The Turn of the Screw

A History of Its Critical Interpretations 1898 - 1979

Edward J. Parkinson, PhD

Chapter II - Early Criticism: 1898-1933

1- Goddard
The most important criticism of The Turn of the Screw prior to Edmund Wilson's famous 1934 article, "The
Ambiguity of Henry James," is undoubtedly Harold C. Goddard's "A Pre-Freudian Reading of the Turn of the
Screw." Although Goddard's essay was not published until 1957, he wrote the essay--according to his daughter,
Eleanor Goddard Worthen--"about 1920 or before" and, year after year, read it to students of literature at
Swarthmore College, where he was a professor of English. Leon Edel in his "Prefatory Note" to Goddard's
article, accepts Ms. Worthen's estimate of the date because Goddard, in the essay, refers to no critic of the story
"later than William Lyon Phelps," (Goddard 1) whose first comments appeared in The Yale Review in 1916,
although Phelps did offer further remarks in his Howells, James, Bryant, and Other Essays, which was
published in 1924 and in his Autobiography with Letters, which was published in 1939. I am not aware of any
evidence which would contradict Goddard's daughter's estimate of the date of composition.

Ms. Worthen, after her father's death, forwarded the essay to Edmund Wilson, who, in turn, gave it to Leon
Edel. Edel then provided the title for the previously untitled essay and published it in Nineteenth Century
Fiction, XII, No. 1 (June, 1957), 1-36--along with a "Prefatory Note" of his own.

In his "Prefatory Note" Edel extends to Goddard "the credit of being the first to expound, if not to publish, a
hallucination theory of the story" (Goddard 1). Edel also--probably in order to justify his choice of a title for the
essay--contends that Goddard's achievement was effected

without the aid of Sigmund Freud. Goddard's essay is a singularly valuable example of textual study. He relied
wholly on what James had written, and he gave the tale that attentive reading which the novelist invited when
he called his work `a trap for the unwary' (1).

Here Edel seems to suggest that Goddard's essay is a specimen of the New Criticism. And, indeed, Goddard
seems to arrive at and present his interpretation by a thoughtful reading of the story itself. He does not refer to
psychoanalytic literature or employ even very common psychoanalytic terminology, such as Oedipus complex,
hysteria, conversion, or transference. Instead he, in his own words, attended closely to "the facts of the story"
(6) and, in Edel's words,

not only sought to understand the psychology of the governess but examined that heroine from the viewpoint of
the children entrusted to her, noting such things as `the governess' account of the wild look in her own eyes, the
terror in her face' (Goddard 2).

Indeed, Goddard's methodology seems to be to "read between the lines" of James's story and decipher another
story--what the characters probably thought and feared and wished for--given the evidence presented in the text.
In so doing, Goddard relies not on technical and abstruse theory, but rather on the sort of "common sense"
understanding of human nature which would be available to any sensitive and intelligent reader.

Goddard first of all reminds us of some facts about the background, personality, and situation of the governess
before the advent of the apparitions--facts which are related by Douglas in the prologue or by the governess
herself in the course of her narrative: for example, "the eccentric nature" (chapter 13) of her father; her troubled
family "where things were not going well" (chapter four); her inexperience; her infatuation with her employer;
the hopeless nature of this infatuation, given the social and economic realities of Victorian Britain; her tendency
to insomnia and mood swings, which she admits in the first chapter of her narrative; the "really great
loneliness," as Douglas puts it, of the position which she accepted; her poor judgment, as evidenced by her
accepting, because of a hopeless romantic attraction, a position requiring such an unusual and unwise
commitment--"that she should never trouble him--but never, never: neither appeal nor complain nor write about
anything..." (Prologue). We have, concluded Goddard, "a girl of no worldly experience and of unstable
psychical background" in a situation which is intolerable for her (6-7).

Goddard then attempts to demonstrate how, naturally, "that inveterate playwright and stage manager, the
subconscious" (9) of the governess would piece together the incomplete information available about the
children and their former guardians to construct an "internal drama" in which she would execute "imagined
deeds of extraordinary heroism or self-sacrifice done in behalf of the beloved object," the children's uncle (8).

According to Goddard, the main elements of the "witch's broth" (7) of incomplete information out of which the
governess constructs her bizarre interpretation of reality are the following: first, "the master's strange
stipulation" that she never contact him again--"something extraordinary, she was convinced, lurked in the
background" (7); second, her discovery that "the boy, Miles, is dismissed from school for no assigned or
assignable reason" (8); third, Mrs. Grose's "inadvertent hint"(8) in chapter two about some mysterious man who
liked "young and pretty" women(9); fourth, Mrs. Grose's oblique remark in the same conversation about the
mysterious end of the former governess, Miss Jessel, who "was not taken ill, so far as appeared in this house,"
but who began a holiday and "went off to die"(7).

The governess's motivation for selecting the particular pattern which she finally chooses to impose on the above
incomplete and hitherto formless picture is her need to execute "some act of unexampled courage" for the man
she loves but cannot possess. "When a young person," says Goddard,

especially a young woman, falls in love and circumstances forbid the normal growth and confession of the
passion, the emotion, dammed up, overflows in a psychical experience, a daydream, or internal drama which the
mind creates in lieu of the thwarted realization in the objective world... Her whole being tingles with the craving
to perform some act of unexampled courage. To carry out her duties as governess is not enough. They are too
humdrum. If only the house would take fire by night, and both children be in peril! Or if one of them would fall
into the water! But no such crudely melodramatic opportunities occur. What does occur is something far more
indefinite, far more provocative to the imaginative than to the active faculties...--namely, the hints and particles
of information we have listed (8-10).

"This material and plan on which the dreaming consciousness of the governess sets to work" (10) begin to take
definite form when she sees Quint for the first time. The governess has been wandering around Bly on a June
evening daydreaming about the employer and imagining how wonderful it would be for him suddenly to appear
and smile in approval of how well she is discharging her duties, when she sees a male figure looking down at
her from a distant tower. "Instantly, however, she perceives her mistake. It is not he. In her heart she knows it
cannot be. But if her love is too good to be true, her fears, unfortunately, are only too true. And forthwith those
fears seize and transform this creation of her imagination" (10). The governess has combined this vision with
Mrs. Grose's earlier hints about Peter Quint to fashion "the specter who is to dominate the rest of the tale," a
being who, "because he is an object of dread... becomes the raw material of heroism." Consequently, at the time
of the second vision of Quint, she experiences, in her words, "the shock of a certitude that it was not for me he
had come. He had come for someone else." Goddard sees no reason for this inexplicable certitude that the
children are the threatened ones other than "the creative logic of her hallucination," which requires that "she
must not merely be brave; she must be brave for someone's sake... She must save the beings whom he has
commissioned her to protect" (11).

This "creative logic" combines with the ignorance and superstition of Mrs. Grose, who precipitately concludes
that the man and woman the governess has seen are Quint and Jessel because of the housekeeper's belief in
ghosts and her dislike of Quint and Jessel. Goddard correctly points out that it is the governess, not Mrs. Grose,
who identifies the female apparition as the former governess and that the governess's description of the
apparition is not at all detailed--the only specifics are that the woman was pale, beautiful, and dressed in black.
He also argues quite persuasively that Mrs. Grose, during her conversation with the governess immediately
following the second appearance of Quint, has not paid much attention to the detailed description the governess
has offered but instead has hastily identified the specter on the basis of only two facts, since these are the two
facts that Mrs. Grose repeats in her "breathless affirmative groan" that the man was hatless and dressed in some
other man's clothes. With his usually memorable and quotable prose, Goddard suggests that the "intellectual
level" of such reasoning is "the level, as anyone who has ever had the curiosity to attend one knows, of a fifth-
rate spiritualistic seance," adding, "As if good ghosts always wore hats and bad ones carried their terrestrial
pilfering into eternity!" (15) Goddard suggests that Mrs. Grose is moved to make this hasty identification
because of the governess's suggestion that the figure is somehow a menace to the children, of whom the
housekeeper is so fond and toward whom she is so possessive: "So do the governess' fears and repressed desires
and the housekeeper's memories and anxieties unconsciously collaborate" (14). Then, throughout the remainder
of the narrative, the governess continually "seizes the flimsiest pretexts for finding confirmation of her
suspicions" (20).

While Goddard has offered an ingenious and convincing explanation of the "identification scene"--the
conversation in which Mrs. Grose identifies the male figure as the ghost of Peter Quint--which allows us to
believe in the innocence of the children, he has been equally ingenious and thorough in his discussion of the
final scene of the story in which Miles dies after "his supreme surrender of the name" of Quint.

Goddard points out that Mrs. Grose in chapter 21 does not guarantee that the children have not met after the
second vision of Jessel at the lake and the ensuing emotional confrontation between the governess and Mrs.
Grose. When the governess asks if they have met, Mrs. Grose is "quite flushed" and answers,

Ah, Miss, I'm not such a fool as that! If I've been obliged to leave her three or four times, it has been each time
with one of the maids, and at present, though she's alone, she's locked in safe. And yet--! (qtd. in Goddard 26).

Secondly, Goddard reminds us that, in the final scene, Miles's first question is, "Is she here?" If the governess's
interpretation of events were correct, we should expect Miles to use the masculine pronoun and refer to Quint.
He would use the feminine pronoun if the idea of spectral visitation came from his sister, whom the governess
has terrified with her insane ravings about Miss Jessel, rather than from his own secret consorting with Quint.
Then, when the governess screams, "It's not Miss Jessel!" he would naturally think of the other former guardian,
Miss Jessel's paramour, who is also deceased (27).

While Goddard provides a detailed and insightful analysis of the psychological processes of the governess, he
does not, as Thomas has justly accused some psychoanalytic critics of doing, "approach `The Turn of the Screw'
as if it were a psychiatric case study rather than a work of fiction" (20).

First of all, Goddard combines his analysis of "the creative logic of her hallucination" with an analysis of "the
creative logic" James has employed to make the story credible to the reader as he

hypnotizes us into forgetting that it is the governess' version of the story to which we are listening, and lures us,
as the governess unconsciously lured Mrs. Grose, into accepting her coloring of the facts for the facts
themselves (19).

The story is perceived as more credible than most stories of the supernatural, according to Goddard, because the
reader, even if not consciously, perceives the real plot, which is believable: "Two children, under circumstances
where there is no one to realize the situation, are put, for bringing up, in the care of an insane governess" (19).
This plot is made credible by the introduction of two characters who, together, would be likely to provide the
governess with an opportunity to continue her depredations undetected: namely, the totally indifferent employer
and the superstitious, ignorant, and easily intimidated housekeeper. The final element, of course, is the isolated
location of Bly.

We are led to forget, suggests Goddard, that no facts--only her bare assertions, accepted, for the most part, by
Mrs. Grose--are presented to support her contentions that the ghosts are a threat to the children and that the
children see them because she matter of factly relates wild hypotheses as facts and includes them in a narrative
containing some true information. The governess offers without differentiation facts and interpretations of
facts--for example, when she in chapter ten relates the fact that she sees Miles on the lawn and the assertion that
Miles is looking above her at some person on the tower or when in chapter seven she relates in the same breath
the fact that she saw Miss Jessel and the assertion that Flora also did. We are offered her interpretations of the
children's behavior as if these interpretations were facts when in chapter seventeen Miles's reference to "this
queer business of ours" is taken to refer to secret visits with Peter Quint and, in chapter twenty-three, his
reference to "the others," the servants at Bly, is interpreted as a reference to the ghosts. Finally, in duping the
reader, the governess is aided by that scintilla of truth which her interpretation contains: the fact that Miles and
Flora are not "just happy natural children." This fact is made apparent by, among other things, "the fearful
language that Flora uses in her delirium, the boy's lie about the letter, the clear evidence at the end that he has
something on his mind that he longs to confess" (23).

A careful reading of the story, however, suggests Goddard, indicates that whatever abnormal behavior the
children exhibit can most plausibly be attributed not to the influence of Quint and Jessel but rather to that of the
governess herself.

Fear is like faith: it ultimately creates what at first it only imagined. The governess, at the beginning, imagines
that the actions and words of the children are strange and unnatural. In the end they become strange and
unnatural for the good and sufficient reason that the children gradually become conscious of the strangeness and
unnaturalness of her own attitude toward them.... Thus do her mania and their fear feed and augment one
another... (22).

Goddard is also to be distinguished from those psychoanalytic critics such as Cargill, Cranfill and Clark, and C.
Knight Aldrich, M.D., among others, who seem to treat the work as the case history of a real psychiatric patient
rather than as a work of art, by his paramount concern with the effect of the work on the reader. All Goddard's
analysis of the narrator's psychology is clearly subordinated to this latter primary concern, explaining the story's
effect on its readers. First, as we have seen, Goddard's analysis of the psychology of the governess is
subordinate to his attempt to explain the terror the story induces which so many other supernatural tales do not--
a terror dependent upon "the quality of being entirely credible, even by daylight" (3), for even skeptical readers
can recognize the plausibility of the true plot--"two children...in the care of an insane governess" (19),
especially when the author creates two other characters--namely, the employer and Mrs. Grose--whose
characteristics complement those of the governess so that the reader is not disturbed by "the unlikelihood of this
situation's occurring...the fact that in real life someone would recognize the insanity and interfere to save the
children" (18).

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Goddard employs his analysis of the psychological processes of the
governess to construct an interpretation which can account for the "beauty" of the story and perhaps, in his
words, "redeem the narrative from the charge of ugliness and render even its horror subordinate to its beauty"
(6). For, if we accept his interpretation, Goddard argues, the story becomes not "a tale of corrupted childhood,"
but rather "a tale of incorruption childhood" in which the children remain "incarnations of loveliness and
charm" who are "withered at last in the flame of the governess' passion. ...And the withering of them in the
flame is rendered tragic rather than merely horrible by the heroism that they display." Consequently, the reader
of this work sees "justice done to the incredible, the appalling courage of childhood." Furthermore, in Goddard's
view, the governess herself can be seen as a tragic figure, a literary demonstration of the truth that "mental
aberration may go hand in hand with strength and beauty of character... The governess is deluded, but she rises
to the sublime in her delusion" (33-34). Because of this paramount concern with the effect of the story on the
reader, Goddard is undogmatic about the existence of the ghosts:

Whether the insane man creates his hallucinations or whether insanity is precisely the power to perceive
objective existences of another order, whether higher or lower, than humanity, no open-minded person can
possibly pretend to say, however preponderating in the one direction or the other present evidence may seem to
him to be (33).

Goddard, therefore, considers the story "susceptible of various readings" (33). This insight, it seems to me, is
one of the most important strengths of Goddard's essay, since no reading's claim to be exclusively correct can be
reconciled with the enigmatic and seemingly contradictory statements of the story's foremost critic, Henry
James himself. Also, Goddard's interpretation can easily be read in conjunction with other outstanding
interpretive essays--most notably those by Lydenberg and Firebaugh--which effect a synthesis between the
Freudian and non-Freudian readings, claiming that the personal problems of the governess interact
synergistically with objectively evil presences to bring about the downfall of the children. A few other early
critics seemed to perceive dimly the necessity of such a synthesis--for example, Elton and Woolf; the weakness
of these critics, however, is that they offer unsupported assertions not grounded in the detailed analysis of the
text which Goddard has provided.

From the foregoing discussion the major strengths of Goddard's outstanding essay should be readily apparent.
The major weaknesses of the essay in my opinion are Goddard's failure to explain the psychodynamics of the
governess's later apparent sexual attraction to Miles (Some psychoanalytic critics have attempted to explain
this) and Miles's dismissal from school.

Some critics--for example, Alexander E. Jones--have cited as a weakness Goddard's "irrelevant" (116) inclusion
of his childhood experiences with an insane servant who used to tell him and his sister of her nocturnal visions
of ghosts. It is easy, however, to dispute the "irrelevance" of such personal material by considering the literary
work's all-pervasive ambiguity together with the author's explanation, in the Preface to Volume 12 of the New
York Edition, of the artistic function of that ambiguity, an explanation which seems to invite the inclusion of a
critic's personal experiences:

There is ...no eligible absolute of the wrong; it remains relative to fifty other elements, a matter of appreciation,
speculation, imagination--these things moreover quite exactly in the light of the spectator's, the critic's, the
reader's experience. Only make the reader's general vision of evil intense enough...and his own experience, his
own imagination...will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him
think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications (xxi-xxii).

Willen suggests that the story is told by a governess rather than a mother and that her narrative is included in the
reports of two other narrators in order to shield "the reader from direct and possibly inhibiting contact with his
own childhood fantasies, thus freeing him for an apparently objective analysis of the story." But such an
apparent freedom is, in Willen's view, spurious, for he states categorically, "Each objective analysis, however, is
conditioned by the reader's childhood experiences and emotional responses to them" (vii).

Goddard's interpretation, moreover, is not mere assertion supported only by a personal anecdote; he offers
abundant evidence from the text to support his particular reading of the story. Furthermore, he offers a
reasonable explanation for his inclusion of the anecdote:

It may be that this experience subconsciously accounts for my reading of The Turn of the Screw. If its influence
is justified, it is worth recounting. If it is unjustified, it should be narrated that the reader may properly discount
its effect on my interpretation of the tale (17).
The distinction that Goddard makes between those personal considerations which may have influenced his
reading and the evidence in the text which validates his reading and which, he holds, should be convincing to
any reader and his emphasis on the latter rather than the former distinguish Goddard's criticism from the later
reader-response approach of such critics as Norman Holland. It is interesting by way of contrast to consider
Holland's essay on "The Purloined Letter," an exploration of how his concerns with adolescent masturbation
coincided with certain elements in the story's structure to produce a particular reading experience in the
pubescent Holland. In Holland's essay the critic's personal experience is primary; in Goddard's it is tangential.

A very conservative New Critic might fault Goddard for the inclusion of another kind of "irrelevant" material:
James's comments about the story in several letters and in the Preface to Volume 12 of the New York Edition.
Goddard, however, can hardly be accused of the intentional fallacy, for he seems to cite James as one critic who
may be in agreement with him, as a way of emphasizing the plausibility of his interpretation. His disclaimer at
the end of his essay indicates that he does not consider such evidence decisive, or even, perhaps, very
important:

I may be guilty of twisting perfectly innocent statements to fit a hypothesis. They do appear to fit with curiously
little stretching. But I do not press the point. It is not vital. It in no way affects the main argument. For in these
matters it is always the work itself and not the author that is the ultimate authority (36).

It could also, of course, be argued that the "elemental human psychology" (10) which Goddard employs would
not seem elemental to one who had not done some reading in psychoanalysis. This, however, is a problem with
almost all New Criticism. Literary critics do a tremendous amount of reading not only in literature but in
psychology, history, philosophy, theology, anthropology, and other disciplines. Some of this knowledge always
influences their approach to a particular text. Their desire to look exclusively at the literary work in question
can only be partially successful.

The New Criticism has also been indicted--quite recently by Terry Eagleton--for ignoring the larger social,
political, and economic realities of the society in which the literary work was produced and the work's political
implications for the critic's own historical milieu. It is thus interesting to note that Goddard's analysis includes a
basis for the development of a sociological, even a Marxist, reading:

The reaction upon a sensitive and romantic nature of the narrowness of English middle class life in the last
century: that, from the social angle, is the theme of the story (34).

Goddard's essay--with its detailed and plausible account of the psychology of the governess, its insightful
tracing of James's artistry in "[throwing] the reader off the scent" (14) to produce terror of a special kind, its
preeminent awareness of literary values, its ingenious readings of the identification scene in chapter 5 and the
final scene in chapter 24 to refute arguments against hallucination theories, and its provision of bases for
readings which combine psychoanalytic, theological, and sociological considerations--is one of the most
outstanding in the history of Jamesian criticism and certainly the most outstanding critical response to The Turn
of the Screw in the period prior to Edmund Wilson's famous essay.
 2- Edna Kenton
Edna Kenton has an important place in the history of the criticism of The Turn of the Screw because she was
the first critic to publish a categorical declaration that the ghosts do not exist outside the mind of the governess.
Her famous essay "Henry James to the Ruminant Reader: The Turn of the Screw" was published in The Arts,
VI (November, 1924), 245-255.In this article, Kenton disputed what she termed "the traditional, we might
almost call it lazy version of this tale"--namely, "the children hounded by the prowling ghosts." On the contrary,
declared Kenton, "Not the children, but the little governess was hounded by the ghosts" (254). The ghosts,
maintained Kenton, "are only exquisite dramatizations of her little personal mystery, figures for the ebb and
flow of troubled thought within her mind, acting out her story" (255).

Kenton's claim to be the first to propound a hallucination theory of the story is disputed by Wagenknecht:

Though Edna Kenton is generally given the credit (or blame) for having first suggested that the ghosts in `The
Turn of the Screw' are hallucinations, this is not strictly accurate. The idea had been advanced before 1924 by a
number of writers, some of them distinguished... (103).

Wagenknecht, however, does not give the names of any of these writers, and my research has failed to uncover
any. I suspect that Wagenknecht has not carefully read the writers he may have in mind.

Ezra Pound, for example, in 1920, called the work

a Freudian affair which seems to me to have attracted undue interest, i.e., interest out of proportion to the
importance as literature and as part of Henry James's own work, because of this subject matter. The obscenity of
`The of the Screw' has given it undue prominence (150).

This is not the same as saying the ghosts are hallucinations.

Similarly, an anonymous reviewer in The Critic (XXXIII, ops., December 1898, 523-524) had stated that the
governess "has nothing in the least substantial upon which to base her deep and startling cognitions," but had
then added,

She perceives what is beyond all perceptions, and the reader who begins by questioning whether she is
supposed to be sane ends by accepting her conclusions and thrilling over the horrors they involve.

This is certainly not an unequivocal statement that the ghosts are hallucinations; it could easily be interpreted to
mean that the governess is a clairvoyant who "perceives what is beyond all perception" and that the reader "ends
by accepting her conclusions" because his horizons have been broadened.

Likewise, Oliver Elton, in 1907, referred to the reader's "doubt, raised and kept hanging, whether, after all, the
two ghosts who can choose to which persons they will appear, are facts, or delusions of the young governess
who tells the story." Such a reference can hardly be interpreted as a commitment to a non-apparitions reading;
indeed, Elton seems committed to the opposing proposition. He refers to "the courage of the young English lady
who, desperate and unaided, vainly shelters the children" and to "the distrust with which others regard her story,
and the aversion towards her inspired by the ghosts in the children themselves." He also says that the
apparitions

figure as the survival of the poison which they had sown while living in the breasts of the innocents. And when
this influence reawakens, the earthly forms of the sowers gather visible shape, at once as symbols and as actual
combatants (255-256).
Virginia Woolf in 1918 opined that Quint and Jessel "have neither the substance nor the independent existence
of ghosts" but rather should be seen as "an illustration, not in itself specifically alarming, of a state of mind
which is profoundly mysterious and terrifying" (63-64). However, she seems to mean here not that the ghosts
are hallucinations per se but that they represent some evil that is within all of us in addition to existing
externally:

The governess is not so much frightened of them as of the sudden extension of her own field of perception,
which in this case widens to reveal to her the presence all about her of an unmentionable evil (63).

Woolf's remarks in a 1921 essay seem incompatible with any interpretation which would locate the ghosts only
in the mind of the governess, and even more incompatible with any attempt to account for them by a
psychoanalytic interpretation. Woolf says that, when we read the novella, "it is not a man with red hair and a
white face whom we fear. We are afraid of something, perhaps, in ourselves." But this "something" seems also
to have a real existence outside our minds:

It is unspeakable. We know that the man who stands on the tower staring down at the governess beneath is evil.
Some unutterable obscenity has come to the surface. it tries to get in; it tries to get at something .... Is it possible
that the little girl, as she turns back from he window, has seen the woman outside? Has she been with Miss
Jessel? Has Quint visited the boy? (72).

Furthermore, this "something" seems not to be explainable through psychoanalytic or any other theory: "It is
Quint who must be reasoned away, and for all our reasoning returns" (72).

Wagenknecht is also unfair to Kenton when he characterizes her essay as "primarily a long purr of self-
satisfaction at having been clever enough to perceive something that nobody else could see" buttressed by "little
or no argument" (103). On the contrary, her article is a closely reasoned argument which relies on evidence of
two kinds: James's statements about The Turn of the Screw itself and about other literary works and internal
evidence gleaned from the story.

Kenton, first of all, cites passages from the Prefaces which, in her opinion, suggest that James intended to
deceive the readers of the story. She reminds us, in this connection, of James's characterization of the story in
the Preface to the 1908 New York Edition version:

It is a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily
caught (the `fun' of the capture of the merely witless being ever but small), the jaded, the disillusioned, the
fastidious (qtd. in Kenton 245).

She also recalls his statements about supernatural tales in the Preface to Volume 17 of the New York Edition.
James had proceeded, she tells us, "with a scruple for nothing but any lapse of application, on the credulous soul
of the candid, or, immeasurably better, on the seasoned spirit of the cunning reader." He later concludes,
"Attention of perusal, I thus confess by the way, is what I, at every point, absolutely invoke and take for
granted" (qtd. in Kenton 245).

That James intended to "catch" the readers by making them believe in the account of an unreliable narrator is
evident, suggests Kenton, from James's discussion in the same Preface of the objections raised

by a reader capable, evidently, for the time, of some attention but not quite capable of enough, who complained
that I hadn't sufficiently `characterized' my young woman engaged in her labyrinth; hadn't endowed her with
signs and marks, features and humors; hadn't in a word invited her to deal with her own mystery as well as with
that of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel (qtd. in Kenton 248).
James's answer to this objection, Kenton reminds us, was to state, "We have surely as much her own nature as
we can swallow in watching it reflect her anxieties and inductions" (qtd. in Kenton 248). That James intended
"her own nature" to have a distorting effect on her perception of reality is evident, according to Kenton, from
the distinction James makes in the same paragraph between "her record of so many intense anomalies and
obscurities" and "her explanation of them, a different matter." Finally, James, in Kenton's view, implies that
asking the reader to believe the governess is asking quite a bit, perhaps too much:

It constitutes no little of a character, indeed, in such conditions, for a young person, as she says, `privately bred,'
that she is able to make her particular credible statement of such strange matters. She had `authority,' which is a
good deal to have given her, and I couldn't have achieved so much had I clumsily tried for more (qtd. in Kenton
248).

Furthermore, says Kenton, if the governess had undesirable traits, we would not expect James to make them
obvious, considering his remarks on Thackeray and Balzac in his essay "The Lesson of Balzac." In this essay
James criticizes Thackeray for insufficient "protection of character" in his treatment of Blanche and Becky in
Vanity Fair, in contrast to Balzac's treatment of Valerie Marneffe. In James's "book of golden rules," says
Kenton, "no character is worth doing unless it is worth loving, and no lover is worthy of his love if he lacks the
instinct to protect the beloved." Accordingly, maintains Kenton,

...if one is making a collection of his agents of evil, they are not to be found among those endowed with the
usual stripes and markings. He loves them even more than Balzac loved Valerie, and protects them with far
finer dexterity. In The Turn of the Screw the protection of character, by all the evidence, reached its apotheosis:
1

not until he came to the writing of The Golden Bowl was James to lean quite so heavily on the strong arm of the
novelist's finer technic (251).

Next, Kenton turns her attention to the story itself. She points out that the prologue--"the submerged and
disregarded forward to the tale" (251)--presents a narrator who is young, inexperienced, and possessed by a
never-to-be-requited infatuation for her employer. She reminds us that this infatuation continues after the
governess arrives at Bly and that the first vision of Quint occurs while the governess is walking around the
estate daydreaming about the man she loves (252). Kenton also emphasizes a point she suspects many readers
may tend to forget--

that it is she [the governess]--always she herself--who sees the lurking shapes and heralds them to her little
world. Not to the charming little Flora, but behind Flora and facing the governess, the apparitional Miss Jessel
first appeared.

Those critics who see "the children hounded by the prowling ghosts" need to be reminded, contends Kenton,
that "no reader has more to go on that the young governess's word for this rather momentous and sidetracking
allegation" (254). Kenton also directs our attention to the governess's discussion of her own "moods" or
psychological states which seemed to presage the appearance of the ghosts:

There were states of the air, conditions of sound and stillness, unspeakable impressions of the kind of
ministering moment, that brought back to me, long enough to catch it, the medium in which, that June evening
out of doors, I had my first sight of Quint... I recognized the signs, the portents--I recognized the moment, the
spot (qtd. in Kenton 254).

Kenton concludes,

So she made the shades of her recurring fevers dummy figures for the delirious terrifying of others, pathetically
trying to harmonize her own disharmonies by creating discords outside herself (254).
Kenton's analysis of the story itself is much less detailed than Goddard's. We are told that the apparitions "are
only exquisite dramatizations of her little personal mystery, figures for the ebb and flow of troubled thought
within her mind, acting out her story" (255), but we are never told precisely what her "story" is -- i.e., how her
unrequited love for the children's uncle and/or her other problems cause her to need the apparitions of Quint and
Jessel; and the only insight we are given into her "little personal mystery" is to be reminded of her
unwholesome infatuation toward the employer. One of the main strengths of Goddard's essay, on the other
hand, is his detailed analysis of why the governess needs the ghosts. Furthermore, Kenton does not provide, as
do Goddard and some other critics, detailed answers to the arguments of the apparitionists. She does, however,
tie her analysis of the story to James's critical statements in a way Goddard does not. She ties "the protection of
character" which James praised in Balzac and incorporated in his own "book of golden rules" for fiction to his
avowed intention in the Preface to Volume 17 of the New York Edition to "rouse the dear old sacred terror"--
i.e., "the tone of suspected and felt trouble of an inordinate and incalculable sort" without presenting "the
offered example, the imputed vice, the cited act, the limited deplorable presentable instance" so as to avoid the
artistic failure of presenting to the reader

some grand form of wrong-doing, or better still or wrong-being, imputed, . . .promised and announced as by the
hot breath of the Pit which would "then, all lamentably, shrink to the compass of some particular brutality, some
particular immorality, some particular infamy portrayed: with the result, alas, of the demonstration's falling
sadly short (qtd. in Kenton 255).

James has created an air of unspecified evil, Kenton maintains, by creating a narrator who "could not specify"
so that "readers of her tender, moving tale have of necessity had to think the evil for themselves." Consequently,
contends Kenton,

the ironic beauty of his subtle device for best expressing the depths of evil is that it was at the same time the
calculated trap of traps for the guarding of his heroine. The eager, thrilled, horrified reader, joined with her in
her vivid hunt after hidden sins, has failed to think sufficiently of her; and has, all oddly, contrived to protect
her quite as romantically as her creator permitted her to protect herself in her charming recital of the happenings
at Bly. Her own story, so naively sympathetic, of the ghosts and children, has been her simple bulwark--even
the cunning reader has been credulous (255).

The reader, in other words, "protects" the governess by "specifying," from his own experience, the exact nature
of the threat posed by Quint and Jessel and, in the process, forgetting that her assertion is the only evidence that
Quint and Jessel pose any threat at all.

The extremely perceptive reader, however, Kenton maintains, experiences much more. The story produces its
fullest effect

when the reader, persistently baffled, but persistently wondering, comes face to face at last with the little
governess, and realizes, with a conscious thrill greater than that of merely automatic nerve shudders before
`horror, 'that the children have been destroyed not by malevolent ghosts but by a self-deluded narrator who has
also deceived the reader "joined with her in her vivid hunt after hidden sins" (255).

In her analysis of the reader's response to the story, Kenton is, of course, very close to Goddard. Goddard also
maintains that the reader is hoodwinked by the superficial plausibility of the account of a seemingly
straightforward narrator and that the reader's experience is deepened and enriched if he realizes, upon
considering the clues in the story--such as the information about the governess in the prologue--that the children
are, in fact, the innocent victims of a well-intentioned but deranged woman. The main difference between these
two critics lies in the importance assigned to the author's intention when considering the reader's response to the
literary work. Goddard considers the critical task to be the examination of the literary work itself, which, as a
New Critic, he considers a self-contained entity. Accordingly, he relies only marginally on statements James
made in the Prefaces and in correspondence, stating, at the end of his essay, that James's intention, even if
ascertainable, "in no way affects the main argument. For in these matters it is always the work itself and not the
author that is the ultimate authority" (36). Kenton, on the other hand, appears to see the literary work as a
communication from the author to the reader and to view the critical task as the ascertaining of what it was the
author intended to communicate. In other words, she seems to approach The Turn of the Screw as though it
were an enigmatic letter or a cryptic diplomatic communication. The critic would then be a decoder, attempting
to discover, from his knowledge of the author and the totality of the situation surrounding the composition of
the missive, what the author intended to convey. Thus, the reader who "sees through" the spurious account of
the governess achieves, by this insight, not only a private artistic experience but an interpersonal experience, a
communication with the author. The insightful reader

has worked for it all, and by that fruitful labor has verified James's earliest contention that there was a
discoverable way to establish a relation of work shared between the writer and the reader sufficiently curious to
follow through (254).

In other words, the hermeneutic enterprise forges a bond between writer and reader--both have labored, and
their labors have combined to produce a particular result, the specific reading experience which the author
intended to effect.

For this reason Kenton is unapologetic in citing statements from the Prefaces as evidence. Indeed, one of her
complaints is that "old reactions to the novels and tales have not undergone re-evaluation; old criticism has not
been re-written" (246) following the publication of the New York Edition Prefaces. Kenton cannot be classified
as a New Critic. She cannot be classified as a reader-response critic a la Norman Holland because she does not
attempt to account for a reading experience unique to one reader because of that reader's individual psychology;
she is interested, instead, in the type of reading experience the author intended any sufficiently perceptive reader
to obtain.

Because of her emphasis on the reader's apprehension of the author's intention-- i.e., a meeting of two psyches,
we might label Kenton a phenomenological critic. For Iser, the characteristic differentiating phenomenological
critics from others is the former's concern with "not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the
actions involved in responding to that text" (Guerin 274). Kenton, like other phenomenological critics, attempts
to achieve a "union" with the consciousness of the author by first identifying with the consciousness of a
fictional character, the governess. This is precisely the approach of David Halliburton in Edgar Allan Poe: A
Phenomenological View. Halliburton "discovers the authorial intentionality in a story by identifying with the
main character" (Staton 63). Kenton would probably agree with J. Hillis Miller, who maintains,

The comprehension of literature is a process of what Gabriel Marcel calls `intersubjectivity.' ...If literature is a
form of consciousness the task of a critic is to identify himself with the subjectivity expressed in the words, to
relive that life it anew in his criticism (Guerrin ix).

Kenton must be distinguished, however, from other critics who are interested in apprehending the
communication the author intended for the reader. Although Kenton tells us that James's methodology involves
enchanting us with the story of an enchanted but seemingly straightforward narrator, she does not provide us
with a detailed analysis of how this deception is produced. We thus cannot call her criticism rhetorical because
she is not concerned with analyzing rhetoric. And we cannot term her criticism technical or philological as Hall
defines these terms--"ascertaining the intention, meaning, and spirit of a work of literature, through its mode of
expression" (482). For we find in her essay nothing like the detailed textual analysis which we find in Maynard
Mack's "The World of Hamlet" and which is recommended in R. P. Blackmur's "A Critic's Job of Work"
Instead, Kenton intuits gestalts from the text and relays them to the reader. Thus, she unapologetically refers to
her first experience with the story:

...I read it first `at night,' in a `country house' -- and in a long ago `first edition' -- into and long past the midnight
hours. The conditions were ideal, and all the admiring and admirable reactions to this `finest ghost story in the
world' were mine; of all the thrills and spiral shudders born of the creeping ghosts and `haunted children' I had
the full effect, but it was an effect differing in some inconsequential ways from many of the admiring and
admirable reactions to his tale; even enhanced a little, I must now believe, by another kind of wondering that
developed steadily along side the prime inevitable wondering over `story' and `plot.' There was the wondering
over the portentous Evil that, from the first page to the last, floated through the great room of the story; but
there was wondering also over the beauty no less portentous in the working of the evil spell. There were the
`ghosts'; but there was also the way they came. There were the lovely `corrupted' children; but there was the
exquisite little governess too, guarding her charges so explainingly--even she seemed a little infected by the
sinister air she breathed in and out so pantingly. ...Strange indeed, today, how this wondering over matters that
few fictions generate blurred any serene certainty, at the end, of what the story was about; and so, in this
particular instance, enhanced the first effect of The Turn of the Screw. Because here was a little oasis in the
wordy desert of fiction; a spot inviting one to linger on a while and search about in all leisure for some possible
buried treasure; a find, in short, worth any waste of curiosity in the hunt for the `fun' that might come out of it
(248).

Kenton accepted the invitation. She lingered to "search about in all leisure for some possible buried treasure" in
her experience of this literary work, and the treasure she found is still studied by those who seek to understand
what they can of The Turn of the Screw.

3- Other Critical Reactions

Although the history of the criticism of The Turn of the Screw during this period is dominated by Goddard and
Kenton, it is nonetheless important to recall that a number of distinguished writers published statements about
the novella prior to Edmund Wilson's famous essay--most notably, Walter de la Mare in 1915, Rebecca West in
1916, Ezra Pound in 1918 and 1920, Virginia Woolf in 1918 and 1923, and Edith Wharton in 1924. We find,
throughout the period, distinguished writers and critics on both sides of the apparitionist/non-apparitionist
controversy, although the preponderance of opinion seems to be apparitionist.

Walter de la Mare took an apparitionist stand, seeing in the story's "blind groping of love amid the debauched
innocence of childhood" a powerful revelation of "a subliminal world that centuries of psychical research can
only supplement" (177). Rebecca West was also an unequivocal apparitionist, viewing the events at Bly as they
"are seen by the clear eyes of the honorable and fearless lady who tells the tale" (97). Similarly, Carl Van Doren
read the story straightforwardly as a tale of "two children so corrupted by wicked servants that words will not
utter the evil in them" (211). And Edith Wharton--one of James's most intimate friends-- also stands with the
apparitionists, referring without irony to "the poor little governess" and "the two figures of evil with whom she
is fighting for the souls of her charges" (40).

Ezra Pound, on the other hand, appeared to read the story non-apparitionally. In 1920 Pound dismissed the story
as "a Freudian affair which seems to me to have attracted undue interest" (150). His designation of the story as
"Freudian" does not, in itself, however, place him definitely in the non-apparitionist camp; for some critics a
story is "Freudian" if it arouses certain responses in the reader. However, two years earlier, Pound had
categorized The Turn of the Screw, along with The Tragic Muse, as the artistic product of a "hater of tyranny"
and as a literary protest "against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of modern
life." He considered the subject of the story to be "`influence,' the impinging of family pressure, the impinging
of one personality on another; all of them in highest degree damn'd, loathsome, and detestable" (28). Pound
could, of course, be referring to the influence on the children exerted by Quint and Jessel, but that would appear
to be a rather forced interpretation of his remarks. When a critic uses terms such as "pretty personal crushing
opposition," "domination of modern life," and "impinging of family pressure," to describe a writer's
preoccupations, we do not ordinarily think the writer is calling for more exorcisms. These descriptions would,
on the other hand, fit in quite easily with an interpretation of the story in which the governess would be driven
to oppress the children because of her own unconscious conflicts, conflicts which could be traced--as some
critics (for example, Spilka), have suggested--to the social and economic inequities of Victorian Britain.

Another interesting non-apparitionist statement was proffered by F. L. Pattee in 1923. Speculating about the
author's creative process, Pattee suggested that the story "is the triumph of science over romance." James began,
suggests Pattee, to write a ghost story

strongly on the side of the emotional and the romantic... yet so fundamental was his scientific habit, his
recording only that which had come within the range of his material experience, that the story may be read not
as a ghost story at all, but as the record of a clinic: the study of the growth of a suggested infernal cliche in the
brain of the nurse who alone sees the ghosts, of her final dementia which is pressed to a focus that overwhelms
in her mind every other idea, and makes of the children her innocent victims.

This, suggests Pattee, was the way James had to metamorphose Bishop Benson's anecdote because of the type
of man and artist James was. "Never did he work from his emotions: always he viewed life objectively, coldly,
accurately, recording only what he saw within the area he thought worthy of study" (180).

We listed as one of the major strengths of Goddard's essay the fact that his interpretation leaves room for
syntheses of apparitionist and non-apparitionist approaches--for example, the 1957 essays by Lydenberg and
Firebaugh, both of which suggest that the psychological problems and mediumistic powers of the governess
facilitate--and perhaps even make possible --the destruction of the children through the agency of objectively
existing demonic forces. It is, therefore, interesting to note that several other early critics either attempted some
synthesis of the apparitionist and non-apparitionist approaches or offered some other explanation of the ghosts--
rejecting both the view that they are objectively existing demonic entities and the contention that they are
hallucinations of the governess.

For example, Oliver Elton, in 1907, declared that the question as to whether the apparitions are "facts or
delusions of the young governess who tells the story" is "kept hanging" (206). He suggested, however, that the
question need not be resolved because the ghosts fulfill a literary function which is distinct from the seemingly
mutually exclusive functions assigned them by apparitionist and non-apparitionist critics.

The ghosts play their part in the bodily sphere as terrifying dramatis personae--neither substance nor shadow;
they are there, as Gorgon faces at the window; while, spiritually, they figure as the survival of the poison which
they had sown while living in the breasts of the innocents. And when this influence reawakens, the earthy forms
of the sowers gather visible shape, at once as symbols and as actual combatants (255-56).

Arthur Waley took a somewhat similar position in a 1918 article. Waley declared that the work is not a ghost
story but a literary statement about childhood. "It deals with the fact that children have an interior life, carefully
hidden from their elders." Waley considered James's statements about the ambiguity of the story to be "quite
untrue"; he considered the wickedness of the servants and the corruption of the children-- their bad language,
for example--to be unquestionably sexual. Quint and Jessel function as literary devices, according to Waley,
"materializations" of "this contamination" in order to convey the story's theme--"beneath this mask of
`absolutely unnatural goodness,' of `more than earthly beauty,' the old contamination lurks." (4-5).

Virginia Woolf, in 1918, effected a synthesis of the apparitionist and non-apparitionist approaches which is
different, in a subtle way, from the approaches of Firebaugh and Lydenberg. She does not argue that the
psychological problems and mediumistic powers of the governess facilitate the materialization of extrinsically
existing demonic entities, but rather that the evil which the governess perceives is so deep and so pervasive that
it eludes any compartmentalization as exterior or interior, being both at once. Quint and Jessel, she contends,

have neither the substance nor the independent existence of ghosts. The odious creatures are much closer to us
than ghosts have ever been. The governess is not so much frightened of them as of the sudden extension of her
own field of perception, which in this case widens to reveal to her the presence all about her of an
unmentionable evil. The appearance of the figures is an illustrations, not in itself specially alarming, of a state
of mind which is profoundly mysterious and terrifying... The horror of the story comes from the force with
which it makes us realize the power that our minds possess for such excursions into the darkness; when certain
lights sink or certain barriers are lowered, the ghosts of the mind, untraced desires, indistinct intimations, are
seen to be a large company (63-64).

In 1921 she reiterated these points, declaring that James's ghosts "have their origin within us. They are present
whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the
strange" (71). Woolf made it clear in this article that she did not consider the ghosts to be hallucinations but
instead to be adumbrations of a depth of evil which is terrifyingly real.

We know that the man who stands on the tower staring down at the governess beneath is evil. Some unutterable
obscenity has come to the surface. It tries to get in; it tries to get at something. The exquisite little beings who
lie innocently asleep must at all costs be protected. But the horror grows (72).

She also suggests, in this article, that no explanation--and thus, I suppose, no psychoanalytic theory--can fully
elucidate the realities at Bly. "It is Quint who must be reasoned away, and for all our reasoning returns. After all
critical speculation, something remains unaccounted for" (72).

A great merit of Woolf's approach is her location of the source of the story's appeal in a certain introspective
turn which human consciousness has taken in the twentieth century. Its appeal, she suggested in 1921, is
distinctly modern. Mrs. Radcliffe is quaint, according to Woolf, because "we have become fundamentally
skeptical" of supernatural horror which assails us from outside ourselves. "Moreover, we are impervious to
fear" (67). Increased introspectiveness, in Woolf's view, has gone hand in hand with psychical research in a
period "which seeks the supernatural in the soul of man." Consequently, a ghost story like The Turn of the
Screw "testifies to the fact that our own ghostliness has much quickened" (63).

At least three critics other than Kenton and Goddard--namely, Virginia Woolf in 1918 and 1921, Edith Wharton
in 1924, and Carl H. Grabo in 1928--discussed James's narrative techniques for engineering feelings of fear and
horror in his readers, and they came to remarkably similar conclusions.

In 1918 Virginia Woolf opined that, in James's ghost stories, "the supernatural is so wrought in with the natural
that fear is kept from a dangerous exaggeration into simple disgust or disbelief verging upon ridicule." She
contrasted these stories with The Mark of the Beast and The Return of Imray by Rudyard Kipling, which, in her
view, "are powerful enough to repel one by their horror, but...too violent to appeal to our sense of wonder" (64).
In 1921 she reiterated her conviction that authorial restraint is an important element in the particular sense of
horror which The Turn of the Screw engenders.

Perhaps it is the silence that. . .impresses us. Everything at Bly is so profoundly quiet. The twitter of birds at
dawn, the far-away cries of children, faint footsteps in the distance stir it but leave it unbroken. It accumulates;
it weighs us down; it makes us strangely apprehensive of noise. At last the house and the garden die out beneath
it... (71-72).

Edith Wharton made similar points in 1924. She commended James for his authorial restraint in The Turn of the
Screw -- "the economy of horror is carried to its last degree." She, like Woolf, opined that ghost stories are
easily vitiated by too many and too obvious supernatural effects:

Many a would-be tale of horror becomes innocuous through the very multiplication and variety of its
horrors....the fewer the better: once the preliminary horror posited [sic], it is the harping on the string--the same
nerve--that does the trick. Quiet iteration is far more racking than diversified assaults; the expected is more
frightful than the unforeseen (40).
This "quiet iteration" was analyzed in more detail by Carl H. Grabo in 1928. Grabo first notes that the novella
"directs itself...to a narrow channel; it aims at intensity" by means of its "unity of place" and the small number
of characters with which it is concerned (208-209). He then analyzes "the successive waves which, with
increasing power and frequency,...create the story's rhythm" (210).

The first wave "opens pianissimo with but the faintest single note of the unusual in the excessive pleasure which
the housekeeper takes in the coming of the new governess." This wave gathers momentum when the governess,
unable to sleep on the first night of her story, seems to hear "`faint and far, the cry of a child'" and later `a light
footstep'" (208). Her uneasiness ceases when she is overcome by the charm of Flora but returns with greater
force in chapter two when she receives the letter form the headmaster informing her of Miles's dismissal from
school and Mrs. Grose's mysterious "references...to the former governess who went away and shortly after died,
and to someone as yet unidentified who liked them young and pretty.'" The wave reaches its climax with the
first vision of Quint in chapter three and then subsides.

The tone of naturalness is re-established. The innocence and beauty of the children are again stressed, and an
explanation for the appearance of the man on the tower is ostensibly sought (210).

But soon comes "the second wave, more powerful than the first" (211). It begins with the second vision of
Quint, which occurs in chapter four. The pace then slackens in the next chapter as Mrs. Grose and the governess
discuss what the vision might mean, but it quickens again with the first vision of Miss Jessel, which occurs at
the end of chapter six and is hysterically related to Mrs. Grose at the beginning of chapter seven. Then the pace
slackens a little as we learn more of Miss Jessel's past, but in vague terms only.... Then it is slowly extorted
from Mrs. Grose, with deepening implications of evil, that Miles knew of the relations of Quint and Miss Jessel
(211).

The third wave, which begins in chapter nine when the governess confronts Quint on the staircase in pre-dawn
darkness, also contains lulls, in the form of

contrasting episodes with the children, but the relief which they afford is now only an intensification of horror,
for the seeming innocence is more and more stripped from them and we guess them to be little monsters of
depravity (212).

Following the governess's confrontation with Miles on the lawn in the middle of the night at the end of chapter
ten, says Grabo, "the purpose of the discarnate demons comes home to the governess with unanswerable
conviction" (212). After the conversation between the governess and Mrs. Grose on the following afternoon,

events mount with growing rapidity to the close. There is no other appreciable lull. The struggle of the
governess for the souls of the obsessed children will permit no intermission (212).

Grabo is primarily concerned with narrative technique, but his narratology is closely tied to his reading of the
story as a moral allegory. For, as the waves succeed one another, according to Grabo, "the horror, it must be
noted, has shifted form the merely uncanny, the horror of discarnate devils, to a horror infinitely deeper, the
moral horror of the conflict of good and evil" (212).

While Grabo is interesting for his designation of a literary theme through a consideration of narrative technique,
Heywood Broun is interesting for his discovery of a literary theme through an analysis of his own psychological
reaction to the story. In a January, 1930 preface to a Modern Library edition of the story, Broun recalls reading
the novella for the first time in the solitude of the Swiss Alps and being prostrated with anxiety for several days.
A sudden insight into the meaning of the story accompanied his recovery from this lamentable psychological
state.
Along about the third night that my clammy obsession waked me, and I gaped dry-throated at the face in my
starry window, I suddenly remembered that `The Turn of the Screw' had been written a fair number of years
before I had ever read it, and that hundreds, probably thousands, of other unfortunates had stared at that same
face in hundreds, probably thousands, of other windows. It was the most healing notion I ever. In fact, I laughed
(viii).

The source of Broun's relief was his realization that

that wretched monster could hardly have been so multiform as to exist actually in all of those windows. All of
us were on the instant preposterous together--preposterous and safe. Any one of us was in mortal danger--all of
us together were a comic and protected company (viii).

The conclusion which Broun drew from this experience--and which, he holds, it is "just possible" is the author's
intended lesson--appears at first trivial, then sinister when we remember that in 1930 fascism was beginning to
sweep over Europe.

All at once I knew why we do cling together, even if sight unseen. I could even understand why we sometimes
behave so badly, when we huddle. We can do anything, we must do anything, rather than try to go it alone, with
our helpless and terrified loneliness clutching at us in the night (ix).

It is tempting to classify Broun's criticism as reader-response criticism a la Normal Holland. However, while
Broun's criticism does bear resemblance to that of Holland and other reader-response critics, there are two
important differences. In the first place, we do not find the detailed psychological analysis of a particular reader
that we find, for example, in Holland's 1968 essay on "The Purloined Letter." Secondly, Broun's, which is
almost entirely narrative, appears to be a hybrid literary form, in between fiction and literary criticism. In this it
somewhat resembles Muriel West's novel--if her book can be called a novel--in which a

fictional character in a lonely house struggles all night with the meaning of The Turn of the Screw. Broun's
account, after all, seems far too overdone to fall outside the realm of fiction. One paragraph bears quoting in its
entirety:

I did finally bring myself to the scratch. I opened the book, read a little of it, and then a little more, and, of
course, finished it in precisely that hideous thralldom that had been its author's wicked purpose. And there was
no clammy sensation I did not sense. There was no sinister horror I did not live through. For nights and nights I
would no more than cajole myself to sleep than I would wake staring out of my windows, glazed eyes fixed on
the icy peaks, waiting, waiting, for that malign head to appear above the window sill. More than that, a full half
the time the head did appear--at least, I could have sworn I saw it. My muscles were rigid, my nerves were
zooming with a horrible intensity, my eyes throbbed with the pain of their protrusion. I cursed Henry James, my
`Beast in the Jungle' friend, my debonair London bookseller. I ached thoroughly for those days of comparative
peace when I knew no more of Henry than that he was the brother of William, when Alps were beautiful white
Alps and not red-headed evil butlers, and when the fate of little children was a problem academic pure and
simple. I was thoroughly badly off. If somebody had come along to tell me of the catharsis value of tragedy, or
the ennobling effect of participating in a dignified horror, I would surely have landed him at the foot of my
steepest Alp (vii-viii).
 Chapter Three - Apparitionists vs. Non-apparitionists: 1934-1948

1- Wilson - 1938
Wilson revised his essay for inclusion in the 1938 edition of The Triple Thinkers. In addition to
quite a few minor stylistic changes, Wilson expanded on his discussion of other Jamesian works as
they are related to his points about The Turn of the Screw. He provides examples of how each
novel of James's first major phase "begins strangely to run into the sands" at some "point--usually
about half way through" so that "the excitement seems to lapse at the same time that the color
fades from the picture; and the ends are never up to the beginnings." For example, in the first half
of The Tragic Muse, "Miriam Rooth . . . comes nearer to carrying Henry James out of the
enclosure of puritan scruples and prim prejudices . . . than any other character he has drawn."
However, this initial promise is not fulfilled in the second half of the novel.

Then suddenly the story stops short: after the arrival of Miriam in London, The Tragic Muse is an
almost total blank. Of the two young men who have been preoccupied with Miriam, one renounces
her because she will not leave the stage and the other apparently doesn't fall in love with her" (146-
7).

Wilson is unconvinced by James's later statement in the Preface to the New York Edition of The
Tragic Muse "that he had been prevented from allowing Miriam Rooth to have a genuine love
affair with anybody by the prudery of the American magazines," pointing out that,

after all, Hardy and Meredith did write about Jude and Lord Ormont and his Aminta and let the
public howl; and it would certainly have enhanced rather than diminished Henry James's
reputation--as to which his ambitions seem by no means to have been modest--if he had done the
same thing himself.

Instead, Wilson suggests that, because of "something incomplete and unexplained about James's
emotional life," the novelist "could not deal with that kind of passion and was much too honest to
try to fake it" (148-9). The relationship of this problem to The Turn of the Screw is made a bit
more direct in the 1938 revision of the essay. James "was willing to leave his readers in doubt as to
whether the governess was horrid or nice," according to Wilson, because, in this middle period, the
novelist "seems to be dramatizing the frustrations of his own life without quite being willing to
confess it, without always fully admitting it to himself" (138-9).

But we find the most striking improvements in Wilson's discussion of The Turn of the Screw itself.
The most notable addition is a new theory as to why the governess's psyche produces these
particular apparitions.

The governess has never heard of the valet, but it has been suggested to her in a conversation with
the housekeeper that there has been some other male somewhere about who `liked everyone young
and pretty,' and the idea of this other person has been ambiguously confused with the master and
with the master's possible interest in her, the present governess. And has she not, in her
subconscious imagination, taking her cue from this, identified herself with her predecessor and
conjured up an image who wears the master's clothes but who (the Freudian `censor' coming into
play) looks debased, `like an actor,' she says (would he not have to stoop to love her!)? (125-6).

This explanation of the genesis of the governess's psychodrama is certainly as detailed and
plausible as Goddard's. Furthermore, it opens some very interesting doors.

For example, in 1962, M. Katan, M.D. would incorporate the idea that the love between the two
ghosts is reflective of three other loves--that between the governess and Douglas, that between the
governess and the employer, and that between the governess and the children--into a
psychoanalytic reading which sees the story as an attempt by James to control his own anxiety
arising from "the traumatic effects of primal-scene observations" (479) by "discharging it onto
others" (476), namely the readers of the story who are terrified as their own primal-scene anxieties
are brought to the surface. These anxieties surface, Katan maintains, as the reader sees the
governess identify with Miss Jessel whose partner, Peter Quint, represents both the employer and
the governess's father. Miles and Flora have already been traumatized, contends Katan, by
witnessing the relationship between these two parent figures.

Similarly, Cole, obviously indebted to Wilson, would later (in 1971) effect a fusion of Freudian
and Marxist insights by suggesting that, in this hallucinatory pattern,

the two ghosts become the opposite of her concept of the two people who affect her most,--herself
and the master--Freud's `antagonistic inversion.' The master, socially unattainable, becomes in her
projections his servant, Peter Quint, who would be her social inferior `in the scale' which is so
important to the governess (7-8).

Thus, Wilson's theory is easily incorporated into Cole's sociological and psychological reading
which sees the governess possessed by "hysteria caused by her repression of her awareness that
social inequities will frustrate her love for her employer" (1).

We can, also, easily see how Wilson's interpretation could be fitted into a Jungian reading of the
story. For, in hallucinating a lascivious counterpart to both herself and her employer, whom she
seems to idealize, the governess can be seen as projecting her shadow. It is not unusual for Jungian
critics to see such projections of the shadow onto both masculine and feminine figures. For
instance, Christopher Bryant, commenting on The Lord of the Rings, reminds us of the episode in
which

Frodo with his companion, Samwise, on their journey to the evil land of Mordor to fulfill the task
laid upon Frodo, are led by Gollum, Frodo's treacherous shadow, into the dark cave passages
where lurks Shelob, the giant spider with evil intelligence and deadly bite (97).

The shadow, here is primarily embodied in the threatening male figure. Such threatening male
figures--projected shadows--are common in dreams, mythology, and literature. As Bryant points
out,

a man's personal shadow represents rejected elements of his masculine potential, his capacity to
fight, for example. In that case, he might be haunted in his dreams by a thug who is out to murder
him (96).

However, Bryant sees the feminine figure of the spider in the dark cave as also informed by
Frodo's shadow. Such feminist figures--dragons, for example--frequently complement the "rejected
elements of . . . masculine potential" we have mentioned. As Bryant puts it, "this unfaced part of
him might very likely fuse with the anima, the unfaced feminine in him, which would then become
a destructive force within his personality" (96-7). Bryant then provides an example from common
experience: "A common form of the anima in its negative aspect is that of the possessive mother
who prevents her children from growing up and living their lives independently of her" (97). This
example demonstrates why the shadow must be seen to inform such a contrasexual archetype:

Of course the monster, the devouring mother, corresponds to a tendency in ourselves. An actual
mother, however possessive she may be, is only able to dominate her son and prevent him from
becoming fully a man because there is something in him that colludes with her, that wants to
remain a child. There is something in us that prefers to be looked after and protected, rather than
face the risks of fighting our own battles (97).

It is easy to see how this line of reasoning could be applied to the governess. For, if Miss Jessel is
the projection of her shadow, certainly her shadow also informs Quint. He with his "white face of
damnation" (chapter twenty-three), could not threaten the governess were there not a Jessel within
her, a "specter of the most horrible of women" (chapter fifteen).

Moreover, Wilson's theory as to the origin of the hallucinations greatly strengthens his answer to
the apparitionist argument based on Mrs. Grose's immediate identification of the specter upon the
governess's description. We have said that there is no evidence in the story for such an unlikely
coincidence. In his revised version, however, Wilson makes his case more credibly:

The apparition had `straight, good features' and his appearance is described in detail. When we
look back, we find that the master's appearance has never been described at all; we have merely
been told that he was `handsome.' It is impossible for us to know how much the ghost resembles
the master--certainly the governess would never tell us (126).

Furthermore, with this story in mind--that Miss Jessel is a projection of a part of the governess's
own personality--Wilson offers a very insightful reading of the scene in the schoolroom in chapter
fifteen in which the governess sees Miss Jessel at the schoolroom writing table. ". . . she had
looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to
sit at hers," the governess tells us. In this scene, maintains Wilson, "the morbid half of her split
personality is getting the upper hand of the other . . . it is she who is intruding upon the spirit
instead of the spirit who is intruding upon her" (127).

In this revision of the essay, Wilson expands on his earlier discussion of the story's final scene,
recalling the governess's vision of "the white face of damnation" at the window and asking, "But is
the governess condemning the spirits to damnation or is she succumbing to damnation herself?"
(129). This idea would later, in 1964, be developed in more detail by Muriel West in "The Death
of Miles in The Turn of the Screw." West considers in detail the context of the governess's final
outburst and concludes that, in this scene, Miles is, indeed, "dispossessed," but that the governess
succumbs to possession herself.

Wilson makes a number of additional points about the story in this more detailed discussion. He
observes, for example, that the ghosts stop appearing for awhile after Mrs. Grose threatens to
contact the uncle, that the governess suppresses the letters the children write to their uncle, and that
Miles and Flora may have met after the final vision of Jessel at the lake. This last occurrence
would, of course, explain Miles's question--"It's she?"--in the story's final scene. Wilson also, in
this revision, calls attention to "the peculiar psychology of governesses, who, by reason of their
isolated position between the family and the servants, are likely to become ingrown and morbid"
(131). Wilson makes one point which seems extremely questionable. Commenting on the scene in
which the candle is blown out while the governess is in Miles's room, Wilson suggests that "the
gust of frozen air" felt by the governess is "the only detail which is readily susceptible of double
explanation." Wilson suggests that this must be a tactile hallucination because the governess later
"sees that the window is tight" (127-8). Wilson's assumption that there is no ambiguity here is
unwarranted. Spirits have been known to cause drafts in closed rooms.

To sum up, then, Wilson's revision of his article for the 1938 edition of The Triple Thinkers is a
great improvement over the original essay. In the revised version Wilson has expanded on his
discussion of Jamesian works as they are related to The Turn of the Screw and has looked in more
detail at the story itself. His explanation of the psychological origins of the phantoms provides
telling insights into the story and opens the door to additional Freudian, Jungian, and Marxist
insights.

2- Reactions to Wilson
The debate which Wilson sparked concerning the reality of the ghosts continued throughout the
period under discussion.

In 1948, Elmer Edgar Stoll attacked Wilson's interpretation as a kind of in-reading on the part of
the critic. He considered Kenton's attempt to "press on `toward the story behind the story`" an
example of "the now timeworn fallacy of confounding art and reality," likening such criticism to
"inquiring into the previous history of Falstaff or Hamlet, of the heroines or the Macbeths, who (of
course), except as meagerly furnished by the dramatist have none" (230) and suggested that
Wilson viewed such things as Flora's insertion of one piece of wood into another through the eyes
of his own Freudian preoccupations, thus imposing on the work an anachronistic set of
significances (229).

Stoll disagrees with Kenton's interpretation of James's description of the work in the Preface to the
New York Edition as "an amusette to catch those not easily caught," suggesting that such passages
"mean . . . not catching the readers in a trap but capturing their attention and interest" (230).

Stoll correctly points out a long literary tradition of genuine ghosts which are visible to some
people and invisible to others--citing examples from Hamlet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar--but then
unwisely adds, "The reality, on the other hand, of the supernatural is conveyed by other means--by
suggestion of indirection--as here, plainly enough" (230). Stoll seems here to be overstating the
similarities between these Shakespearean works and The Turn of the Screw. The ghost of Hamlet's
father, after all, is seen by quite a few people at the beginning of the play, although it is invisible to
Gertrude when it appears to Hamlet in the Queen's chamber. Similarly, while it is true that the
ghost of Banquo is invisible to all but Macbeth, it must be remembered that the earlier supernatural
visitations--the Weird Sisters--were visible to both Macbeth and Banquo.

Other arguments advanced by Stoll are weaker still. Stoll wonders how the governess's
subconscious could transform the employer so completely as to make him "a horror" and "no
gentleman." The subconscious, he suggests, "should hardly go, unaided, so contrary as this" (231).
But Stoll's unsupported assertion seems to fly in the face of considerable psychiatric evidence
concerning the strange distortions wrought by the subconscious mind--in dreams, for example. His
suggestion that Wilson reads into events a psychoanalytic significance foreign to the mind of
James might suitably be applied to the later psychoanalytic criticism of Cargill which was
published in 1956, a source study suggesting that Freud's writings per se influenced James in his
composition of the work. The argument is less compelling when applied to a critic such as Wilson
who holds that universally valid Freudian insights can fruitfully be applied to historical figures
such as statesmen or clients of psychoanalysts. Stoll begs the question by objecting that Wilson's
interpretation fails to "explain the children's taking so keen an interest in secretly looking at and
holding commerce" with the ghosts and "intriguing and conspiring together for that purpose," as
well as "their corruption under the influence of the valet and the former governess, both when alive
and when dead" (231). The above data are communicated to us only by the governess;
consequently, if she is unreliable, there is nothing for Wilson or any other critic to "explain" about
these happenings. Stoll is also on slippery ground when he claims that Wilson's theory is
invalidated by "the confessions of the boy when approached on the subject and the deep
resentment of the girl," along with "the hesitating but increasingly frank admissions of the
housekeeper" (231). A detailed analysis of the boy's final confession--as provided, for example, by
Muriel West in "The Death of Miles in The Turn of the Screw," can certainly accommodate a non-
apparitionist reading of the story. Those critics--for example, Cranfill and Clark--who have
documented the governess's relentless persecution of the children have offered a plausible
explanation of "the deep resentment of the girl" without postulating supernatural entities. And
Goddard's theory of how "the governess' fears and repressed desires and the housekeeper's
memories and anxieties unconsciously collaborate" (14) demonstrates that this argument from
Stoll is not unanswerable. Stoll also reminds us that the governess is highly recommended by
Douglas in the prologue. Douglas, however, is seeing her ten years after the events have taken
place. Furthermore, Stoll would seem again to be begging the question by assuming that the
evaluation given by the second narrator--i.e., by Douglas, must be accepted at face value. If one
narrator's account can be questioned, why not another's? If, on the other hand, we agree with Stoll
that to question a narrator in a fictional work is "like discounting prologues or epilogues, choruses
or soliloquies, addressed the audience and necessarily to be taken at face value" (230), then it
would appear that we must dismiss Wilson's reading from the outset and that evidence adduced
from another narrator is redundant. When Stoll suggests that Wilson is "forgetful, like most
contemporary critics, of Aristotle on plot and character" (232), in not taking the governess's
account at face value, he seems, like some critics of the Chicago School, to be unthinkingly and
rigidly applying classical canons where they would appear to have no relevance. Stoll also errs in
mixing Douglas's descriptions of the governess with James's statements in the New York Edition
Preface about "agents" and "demons," forgetting apparently the difference between the statements
made by a fictional character and an author's comments about his own work. He also seems to fall
into the trap of the intentional fallacy. Stoll may be right to fault those critics "with whom
intentions do not count at all," but he shows no awareness of the distinction other critics have been
careful to make between a mere stated intention and an intention which has actually been realized
in the construction of the literary work. Thus, Halliburton says that "the intentionality" to be
sought "is not in the author but in the text" (Guerin 268). Finally, Stoll's remark that
"hallucinations scare only the hallucinated" (231) is manifestly untrue. Certainly the story of
children in the care of an insane governess--as the novella is read, for example, by Goddard or by
Cranfill and Clark--is very terrifying.

Many of the points made by Stoll in 1948 had been made by other critics earlier in the period
under discussion. In 1947, for example, Robert N. Heilman, in an article entitled "The Freudian
Reading of The Turn of the Screw," also relied heavily on what he perceived to be James's stated
intentions in the Preface to the New York Edition version of the story. He was particularly scornful
of Wilson's interpretation of the statement, "She has authority, which is a good deal to have given
her," arguing that James intended here to invest the governess with credibility and, in so arguing,
lashing out intemperately at Wilson: "Once again, then, the word authority has brought about, in an
unwary liberal, an emotional spasm which has resulted in a kind of emotional blindness" (434). In
arguing that the story is not primarily about the governess, Heilman quotes James's statement
which appears on page xix in the Preface to Volume 12 of the New York Edition: ". . . I saw no
way, . . . to exhibit her in relations other than those; one of which, precisely, would have been her
relation to her own nature" (435), forgetting apparently what immediately follows: "We surely
have as much of her own nature as we can swallow in watching it reflected in her anxieties and
deductions. . . ."

Ironically, Heilman accuses Wilson of ignoring the first part of this quotation and then proceeds
himself to ignore the second part. Heilman also refers to James's statements about the story in
correspondence but with the same selectivity, quoting extensively only the 1898 letter to H. G.
Wells. Heilman argues, with some cogency, that

the governess's feelings for the master are never repressed: they are wholly in the open and are
joyously talked about: even in the opening section which precedes Chapter 1, we are told that she
is in love with him (436).

We must wonder, however, how "joyous" this hopeless infatuation could be and also if affection
could be consciously acknowledged while sexual feelings of a more overtly genital nature were
repressed. Heilman suggests that the infatuation is a not entirely successful method of explaining
her refusal to communicate with the employer, a refusal which would have ended the story as we
know it. But, when he suggests that "a technical procedure should not be mistaken for a
psychopathological clue" (437), he perhaps forgets that it might be both and also that it might be
"not quite successful" in explaining this dereliction of duty only if it is considered normal--not
reporting to the employer these unusual and dire events is, after all, irrational.

Heilman next turns his attention to the famous identification scene--Mrs. Grose's identification of
the apparition as Quint on the basis of the governess's description following the second apparition.
Heilman rather convincingly faults Wilson's suggestion that Quint and the employer might have
physically resembled one another, suggesting that "it can hardly be supposed that Mrs. Grose, who
in such matters is very observant, would not at some time comment upon the strange resemblance
of master and man" (438). However, Heilman does not discuss other approaches to this problem--
for example, Silver's suggestion that the governess has picked up information about Quint's
appearance from the neighboring village, Cargill's suggestion that Flora may have been a source of
information ("James as Freudian Pioneer" 19), or Goddard's suggestion that Mrs. Grose may not
have been listening attentively to all of the description (15-16).

Heilman, like Stoll, is unconvinced by Wilson's reminder that only the governess is known to see
the ghosts. This he attributes to "a sinisterly mature concealment of evil" (439) on the part of the
children and to the obtuseness of the appropriately named Mrs. Grose,

the good but slow-witted woman who sees only the obvious in life--for instance, the sexual
irregularity of Quint and Miss Jessel--but does not unassisted detect the subtler manifestations of
evil (438).

This argument, though questionable, is certainly superior to Stoll's simplistic, incomplete, and
misleading comparisons to Shakespeare.

Heilman sees great significance in "the objective fact of the dismissal of Miles from school--a
dismissal which is unexplained and which is absolutely final" (439). He perhaps fails to appreciate,
however, the significance of the fact that the governess has not given us the text of the
headmaster's letter and Douglas's assertion that Miles was unusually young for a residential school.
Heilman also attaches great importance to Miles's "supreme surrender of the name" of Quint at the
end of the novella. In arguing that point, however, he is unfair to Wilson when he asserts that "in
plain defiance of the text Wilson says that Miles has managed to see Flora before her departure and
thus to find out what the governess is thinking about" (439). Wilson, instead of making such a bald
assertion, had merely pointed out that the text leaves open the possibility of such a meeting with
Flora and a discussion of the governess among the two children and Mrs. Grose. Goddard had
earlier made the same point in his then unpublished essay. Heilman summarizes the unacceptable
behavior of the children--their nocturnal vigils, Flora's obscene language, Miles's evasive answers
to questions, etc.--but seems not to have thought of the explanation later to be advanced by
Lydenberg: "What is happening to the children is, clearly and terribly, the governess herself" (40).

In A Treatise on the American Novel, Robert Liddell presented what he considered to be a

thorough and irrefragable refutation of Wilson's theory.

Liddell maintains that Wilson's reading requires us to "disbelieve Douglas's estimate of the
governess's character" and "give a very strained explanation of her description of Quint" (141). We
considered these two points in our discussion of Stoll, so there is no need for repetition here.
Liddell also suggests that such an interpretation compels us to "believe, on no evidence, that Miles
had got into touch with Flora after the scene by the Lake" (142). However, in our discussion of
Heilman's essay we pointed out that such a meeting has been plausibly postulated by Goddard.
Liddell also objects that Wilson's reading necessitates the assumption that the governess "is
deluded about the very sense-data experienced in Miles's room, not only about her interpretation of
them" (141). Here, however, Liddell seems to beg the question, for a woman capable of
hallucinating ghostly visitants could certainly be "deluded about the very sense data experienced"
on that occasion. Liddell's next move is simply to assert his position and then announce that his
mere assertion in some way constitutes proof:

But the chief objection is one of general impression: this is not what the story means, and only
perverted ingenuity, of a kind which has little to do with literature, could have detected the `clue'.
This is the ultimate answer to all such theories, from the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy to
Verrall's brilliant perversities about Greek tragedy. Here there is a desire for a `scientific'
explanation, an unwillingness to make the necessary `suspension of disbelief' in ghosts, which is
completely opposed to the spirit in which the book should be read. It is only because Mr. Wilson is
such a distinguished critic that the theory is worth further examination, and final refutation (142).

Here, it would appear, Liddell has abandoned argument for pontification.

Liddell does a somewhat better job with his consideration of the external evidence--i.e., James's
statements about the story. Commenting on James's distinction in the Preface between the
governess's "record of so many intense anomalies and obscurities" and "her explanation of them, a
different matter," Liddell offers an interpretation which is a plausible alternative to Wilson's
hallucination theory:

. . . we can doubt her explanation of the happenings, without supposing her to be the victim of
hallucination. She clearly believes that she sees the spirits that once animated the earthly bodies of
Quint and Miss Jessel; we can believe that she did indeed see ab extra apparitions, that another
person with the right vision could have seen, without accepting her view of their eschatological
status. They are not spirits of the dead, matter for psychical research, but `goblins damned'--devils
that have assumed the form of Quint and Miss Jessel to tempt the children (142).

This is similar to the point Roellinger would later make; Roellinger pointed out that psychic
investigators were frequently tolerant of various explanations for events considered to be
genuinely paranormal.

Liddell, however, is on less firm ground when he cites evidence from James's notebooks and
correspondence concerning the origin of the story in Archbishop Benson's anecdote. Liddell may
be correct in his assertion that "Henry James began to construct this story not from a character, but
from a scrap of anecdote" (143), but surely the story's genesis is less important than the final form
it took. A similar point can be made about Liddell's evaluation of the significance of the story's
debts to The Mystery of Udolpho and Jane Eyre: "It is from literature rather than from the
abnormal psychology of himself or his governess that the relation between her and the ghosts
arises" (144). Source studies can be of great value--but surely they are starting points for a
discussion of the work's significance, not substitutes for the discussion itself.

3- Heilman, 1948
We began this chapter with a consideration of what is arguably the historically most important
non-apparitionist essay on The Turn of the Screw. In 1948 Robert N. Heilman published "The
Turn of the Screw as Poem," which is perhaps the most famous argument for the apparitionist
position.

Heilman contends "that, at the level of action, the story means exactly what it says"--i.e., that the
governess's assumptions about the evil of Quint and Jessel, the corruption of the children, and the
return from the dead of the nefarious servants--are all to be accepted at face value. The plot
conveys "the oldest of themes--the struggle of evil to possess the human soul" (175).

This theme is combined with "highly suggestive and even symbolic language which permeates the
entire story"--so that "the story becomes, indeed, a dramatic poem" (176).

Heilman attends closely to the language of the story and cites numerous examples of references to
the innocence and beauty of the children at the outset and the depth of their later degradation to
establish that, in this story, "the incorruptible . . . have taken on corruption" (176) and that the "real
subject is the dual nature of man, who is a little lower than the angels, and who yet can become a
slave in the realm of evil" (177-78).

Consequently, according to Heilman,

the ghosts are evil, evil which comes subtly, conquering before it is wholly seen; the governess,
Cassandra-like in the intuitions which are inaccessible to others, is the guardian whose function it
is to detect and attempt to ward off evil; Mrs. Grose--whose name, like the narrator's title, has
virtually allegorical significance--is the commonplace mortal, well intentioned, but perceiving only
the obvious; the children are the victims of evil, victims who, ironically, practice concealment--
who doubtless must conceal--when not to conceal is essential to salvation (175).

Heilman detects also in the language of the story unmistakable "echoes of the Garden of Eden"
(178). According to Heilman,

Miles and Flora become the childhood of the race . . . . Even the names themselves have a
representative quality as those of James's characters often do: Miles--the soldier, the archetypal
male; Flora--the flower, the essential female. . . (178-79).

The language used to describe the children and the change within them is complemented,
according to Heilman, by "James's management of the setting and of other ingredients in the
drama," as the idyllic descriptions of Bly in the spring (at the beginning of the story) suggest that
the country estate "is almost an Eden" where "`the three lived in a cloud of music and love'" and
"where `the old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade'. . . ." The change in the
children, Heilman points out, which is shown by the change from images of light and purity to
those of darkness and ill health and even premature age are accompanied by changes in the
language used to describe the setting, which "is gradually altered until we reach the dark ending of
a November whose coldness and deadness are unobtrusively but unmistakably stressed;. . . ' the
autumn had dropped . . . and blown out half our lights' . . .; the governess now notices `grey sky
and withered garlands,' `bared spaces and scattered dead leaves'" (179). Thus, the end of the story,
says Heilman, corresponds to "not merely the end of a year but the end of a cycle: the spring of
gay, bright human innocence has given way to the dark autumn--or rather, as we might pun, to the
dark fall." As this progression occurs, the earlier light imagery changes to "a hard, powerful, ugly
light--an especially effective transformation of the apparently benign luminousness of the spring"
as Quint, Jessel, and Miles are shown, at various times, to be "glaring" (179-80).

Coincidental to this passage of time in the story, Heilman observes, is a shift from language
suggestive of youthful innocence to that which suggests an abnormal aging of the children.
Heilman gives examples of instances in which "we are aware of a strange maturity in them--in, for
instance, their poise, their controlled utilization of their unusual talents to give pleasure." Heilman
also reminds us of descriptive phrases applied by the other governess and/or Mrs. Grose. Thus,
". . . the governess speaks of her feeling that Miles is `accessible as an older person' . . . the
governess assures Mrs. Grose . . . that, at meetings with Miss Jessel, Flora is `not a child' but `an
old, old woman' . . . Mrs. Grose sums up, `It has made her, every inch of her, quite old'" (180).

Heilman, furthermore, calls attention to the language used to describe Quint, whose characteristics
are "unmistakably the characteristics of a snake" and to language which suggests that the influence
of the two spectres has been that of a "poison" redolent of the forbidden fruit in the Garden of
Eden (181).

By this combination of language suggesting external malign influences and language suggesting
change in the children, moreover, James, according to Heilman, "presents evil both as agent (the
demons) and as effect (the transformation in the once fresh and beautiful and innocent children)"
and, consequently, "these attacking forces, as often in Elizabethean drama, are seen in two aspects.
Dr. Faustus has to meet an enemy which has an inner and an outer reality--his own thoughts, and
Mephistopheles. . ." (183).

In Heilman's view, Miles's final cry, "You devil!" is

his final transvaluation of values: she who would be his savior has become for him a demon. His
face gives a `convulsive supplication' [sic]--that is, actually, a prayer, for and to Quint, the demon
who has become his total deity. But the god isn't there, and Miles despairs and dies (183-84).

Here Heilman sees biblical motifs combined with other literary ones: ". . . Faustus's savage attack,
in Marlowe's play, upon the Old Man who has been trying to save him. . ." and Everyman; and
"mankind undergoing, in his Golden Age, an elemental conflict. . ." (184).

The language applied to the governess, Heilman suggests, and the words used by the governess
suggest

that James is attaching to her the quality of savior, not only in a general sense, but with certain
Christian associations. She uses words like `atonement'; she speaks of herself as an `expiatory
victim,' of her `pure suffering,' and at various times--twice in the final scene--of her `torment.'
Very early she plans to `shelter my pupils,' to `absolutely save' them; she speaks variously of her
`service,' to `protect and defend the little creatures . . . bereaved . . . loveable' (184).

In addition to combinations of literary motifs, Heilman perceives various theological threads in the
story. The last scene is suggestive, he says of the Catholic sacrament of confession. ". . . the long
final scene really takes place in the confessional, with the priest endeavoring, by both word and
gesture, to protect her charge against the evil force whose invasion has, with consummate irony,
carried even there." This "theme of salvation and damnation which finally achieves specific form
in the sacramentalism of the closing scenes" is enriched by "faint traces of theological speculation"
as to the nature of original sin. Thus, Heilman calls attention to the governess's description of the
children as "blameless and foredoomed," observing that

. . . original sin . . . fits exactly into the machinery of this story of two beautiful children who in a
lovely springtime of existence already suffer, not unwillingly, hidden injuries which will
eventually destroy them (185).

Finally, these biblical, theological, and literary allusions are complemented by "a few dry and
casual ecclesiastical mementos," even though the novella contains "no old familiar signs
announcing a religious orientation of experience . . . nothing of the Bible overtly . . . no texts, no
clergymen . . . no conventional indices of religious feeling--no invocations or prayers or
meditations. . . ." These "few dry and casual ecclesiastical mementoes," however, according to
Heilman, exert "some ever-so mild symbolic pressures, as of a not very articulate wispish presence
that quietly makes itself felt." Thus, Heilman reminds us that

the reading of the story . . . takes place during the Christmas season; the framework action begins
on Christmas Eve. Quint appears for the first time on a Sunday, a grey, rainy Sunday, just before
the governess is about to go to the late church service with Mrs. Grose; after that she is, she says,
`not fit for church' . . . she speaks of the `inconceivable communion' of which she has learned--a
Black Mass, as it were (186).

Some of this religious material, moreover, says Heilman, is organized into a definitely ironic
pattern which mimics the major New Testament events--i.e., those occurring from Good Friday
through Easter Sunday. Miles's direct confrontation with the governess on the way to church, in
the fourteenth chapter, according to Heilman, "introduces a straight-line action which continues
with remarkably increasing tension to the end of the story . . . and here is the notable point--takes
only three days."

Ironically, the governess "undertakes her quasi-priestly function with a new intensity and
aggressiveness" on a Sunday--beginning thus on the day when the New Testament action is not
begun but successfully completed. Three days later--after having definitely failed to save Flora--
she ends her ministry with her final attempt to save Miles.

The would-be redeemer of the living is called `devil'; in Quint we see one who has risen again to
tempt the living to destruction--that is, the resurrection and the death. Here, Sunday does not
triumphantly end a symbolic ordeal that had begun in apparent failure on Friday; rather it
hopefully initiates a struggle which is to end, on the third day, in bitter loss. . . . To transmit its
quality and to embrace all of its associations, may we not call it a Black Easter? (187).

Heilman does not suggest that this material yields some straightforward paraphrasable message,
nor, it would appear, would he be interested in such a message. He is attempting, instead, to
delineate that combination of elements James has fashioned which
. . .endows his tale with an atmosphere in which we sense the pressure of so much more
imaginative force than meets the casual fiction-reading eye. In attempting to state schematically
the origins of that pressure, we fall into much more blunt statements that we ought to make. We
say, too forthrightly, that Bly `becomes' a Garden of Eden. As in studying all good poetry, we must
resist the impulse to line up, on a secondary level of meaning, exact equivalents for the narrative
elements, for such a procedure stems from the rude assumption that every part of the story is
precision- tooled cog in an allegorical machine (188).

Nevertheless, Heilman is careful to insist that, while the story cannot be reduced to some
paraphrasable message, "these patterns, which overlap and interfuse in a way badly obscured by
the clumsy analytical process, are unquestionably important in the formation of the story and the
qualifying of its meaning. . ." (188).

Heilman's essay, like Wilson's, has, in a powerful way, called attention to an important dimension
of the story and one which, otherwise, might not have been accorded sufficient recognition.
However, while Wilson appears to ignore religious elements which, as Heilman has shown, are
unquestionably there, so Heilman fails to consider the case against the governess, a case which so
many critics have made. This is why, in my opinion, the essays of such critics as Bewley,
Firebaugh, and Lydenberg, all of which will be discussed in the next chapter, are much richer
interpretations of the story than is either Wilson's or Heilman's.

Heilman's essay should be categorized as an example of exponential criticism, which is concerned

with patterns of language--including "motif, image, symbol, and archetype" (Guerin 197).
Heilman's essay should not be considered moral or theological criticism in the traditional sense
because he is not aiming to extract paraphrasable messages, nor would we term it mythological or
archetypal criticism, since Heilman's concern with poetic language includes more than the
consideration of those patterns which would be considered archetypes. Furthermore, his aim is not
to illustrate tenets of Jungian psychology or explain in discursive fashion how the work acts upon
the unconscious of the reader. Rather, his critical method seems to fit the description of
exponential criticism advanced by Guerin et alia:

Bit by bit, as we notice instances of a pattern, we work our way into the experience of the story,
poem, or play. As we follow the hints of thematic statement, recognize similar but new images, or
identify related symbols, we gradually come to live the experience inherent in the work. The
evocative power of steadily repeated images and symbols makes the experience a part of our own
consciousness and sensibility. Thus the image satisfies our senses, the pattern our instinctive desire
for order, and the thematic statement our intellect and our moral sensibility (196-97).

Conclusion
Our survey in this chapter of the apparitionist/ non-apparitionist debate following Wilson's seminal
essay would seem to reflect an overwhelming predominance of apparitionist opinion during this
period. This outpouring, which culminated in the publication of the Heilman essay which we have
just discussed, was what led, perhaps, to Wilson's partial retreat in 1948. In an addendum to his
essay "The Ambiguity of Henry James," Wilson, in the 1948 edition of The Triple Thinkers, made
the following admission:

. . . it has struck me that I forced a point in trying to explain away the passage in which the
housekeeper identifies, from the governess' description, the male apparition with Peter Quint. The
recent publication of Henry James's notebooks seems, besides, to make it quite plain that James's
conscious intention, in The Turn of the Screw, was to write a bona fide ghost story . . . (123).

He, therefore, revised his position thus:

One is led to conclude that, in The Turn of the Screw, not merely is the governess self-deceived,
but James is self-deceived about her (125).

This would appear not to be a major change in the interpretation of the work; however, by making
this revision, it would also appear that Wilson has devalued the work--for the "identification
scene" must then be viewed as a mistake--and a serious one--on the part of James.

The period covered by this chapter--1934 to 1948, inclusive--is bounded by two outstanding and
famous critical essays arguing respectively the non- apparitionist and apparitionist position, the
latter essay's publication coinciding roughly with a partial retraction on the part of the author of the
former essay. Since Heilman's outstanding example of exponential criticism was published only a
year after he specifically replied to Wilson, it is reasonable to assume that his famous theological
reading might not have been formulated had Wilson not so effectively argued the opposing case.
Thus, Wilson clearly dominates the period under discussion.

Wilson's essays were fine examples of that type of psychoanalytic criticism which focuses on the
author and, in so doing, sheds additional light on the literary work. His criticism never deteriorated
into mere psychoanalysis of an individual of historical importance; rather, his aim was always
better to understand the works in question and the readers' responses to these works by exploring
the creative processes of the author and the persona which the author projected in the narrative. His
criticism related The Turn of the Screw to the rest of the Jamesian canon in such a way that the
novella and the rest of the canon served to illuminate one another. The 1938 revision, in addition to
considering additional internal evidence to support Wilson's thesis, and expanding the discussion
of James's other works, offered insights which could be further developed in a Jungian reading of
the story.

In addition to providing the main impetus for the debate between the apparitionists and non-
apparitionists, Wilson's essay sparked a great interest in the psychology of James the man and
artist, so much so that L. C. Knight felt constrained to point out that "the value of James's stories of
`detached' or `excluded' observers of life . . . is something to be determined by the methods of
literary criticism" (607) rather than by armchair psychoanalysis of the man who wrote the stories--
a truth of which Wilson himself never needed to be reminded.

The apparitionist reaction to Wilson culminated in Heilman's outstanding example of exponential

criticism. Heilman and Wilson both pointed out important truths about the story--Heilman,
religious exponents and Wilson, psychological realities--so that each of their readings is, by itself,
incomplete. It would take later critics--Lydenberg, Firebaugh, and Bewley, for example--to
synthesize the two sets of insights and demonstrate that each is needed to provide what the other
lacks.

Chapter IV – Movement Toward Synthesis: 1949- 1957

The period from 1949 through 1957, inclusive, was dominated by Heilman and Wilson, as the best
critics strove for a synthesis of the insights into the work which each of these critics had provided.
Thus, we see here an illustration of the truism that a literary work is never the same after it has
been discussed extensively by a great critic. Wilson and Heilman were both great critics; and,
although they disagreed with one another, both were right--each made a compelling case which
subsequent critics felt compelled to acknowledge as they strove for greater understanding of the
literary work. So obviously valid were many of the points raised by both Wilson and Heilman that
some critics who were unable to synthesize the two sets of insights felt constrained to devalue the
literary work itself as hopelessly disunified and flawed--they could not thoroughly and
convincingly refute either Wilson or Heilman.

Chapter V – The Influence of Structuralism: 1958- 1969

1- Analyses of Narrative Techniques

We have seen that the period from 1949 through 1957 was dominated by the figures of Wilson and
Heilman, as the best critics strove to effect syntheses of these two giants' competing sets of
insights--respectively, psychoanalytic and theological readings of the story. So persuasive and so
obviously valid were the two sets of insights that few critics of stature could produce
interpretations affirming exclusively one side of the controversy.

During the next period under discussion we find a continuation of this pattern with important
modifications. One of the most important of these modifications, as Kimbrough points out, is an
increasing "emphasis on technique rather than content" (235) in critical analyses of the story.
Increasingly, that is, critics, following the lead broached by Edel in his discussion of the novella in
The Psychological Novel--published in 1955--concentrated less on deriving philosophical themes
which would integrate the psychoanalytic and theological readings and more on studying the ways
in which the ambiguity had been produced by the author--through a study of his narrative
techniques--and the effects of such ambiguity on the reader's experience of the text. Thus, the
ambiguity tended to be cited as worthy of study in its own right--not merely as a pointer to some
theme. This tended to produce two kinds of criticism--genre criticism and reader-response
criticism. The former tended to be mixed with source studies as critics looked at the literary
influences James had employed and the ways in which he had modified them to produce this piece
of artistry--with its ambiguous undertones. These ambiguities were often seen as results of patterns
of various exponents from sources as diverse as novels, plays, the writings of psychiatrists such as
Freud, Charcot, Janet, and Parish, and the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.
Sometimes, other writings by James were included as sources which appeared in modified form in
the The Turn of the Screw--and thus, the door was opened to a resurgence of that authorial
criticism which seeks to understand more fully a particular literary work by studying the author's
entire canon. This naturally led to a new emphasis on speculations about the author's intentions as
realized in the construction of the literary work.

Alexander E. Jones, in 1958, followed Edel in emphasizing the importance of the narrative "frame"
of the novella--i.e., the three interrelated narrators-- the anonymous guest, Douglas, and the
anonymous governess.

Jones interprets the story in a traditional, non-Freudian manner--holding that the ghosts are
objectively existing entities from which the governess wished to save the children. He credits her
with a partial victory at the story's end: "...Flora has been removed from the corrupting atmosphere
of Bly: and, although Miles is dead, his heart has been dispossessed" (122). The incompleteness of
her victory is attributable not to any fault of hers but to the overwhelming power of the evil she has
been forced to fight. Admitting that she has some defects--of the kind which critics such as
Lydenberg have cited (pride, bad judgment, etc.)--Jones denies that she wants the ghosts to be
there and insists that "her all-too-human frailty should not blind the reader to her great
accomplishment. Standing resolutely at her own little Armageddon, she has routed the forces of
evil" (122). Those traits which critics such as Lydenberg have taken as evidence against her Jones
takes as evidence of her honesty--since she included them in her record of events.

Jones, in arguing for his interpretation of the story, relies mainly on evidence of two kinds: the text
itself, which he interprets in a New Critical manner, and evidence of James's intentions which he
discerns from an examination of the author's statements about the work in the Preface to the New
York Edition and in correspondence about the novella. In these respects his methodology
resembles the phenomenological criticism of Kenton. Like Kenton, he seems to see the text as an
enigmatic message from the author and the critic's task as a deciphering of the message the author
intended to convey. His understanding of this intention is, of course, very different from Kenton's.
He is also similar to Kenton in his overriding interest in fully experiencing--not only intellectually
but also emotionally--those effects the author intended to convey. Jones differs from Kenton,
however, in his additional emphasis on an objective examination of the narrative structure of the
work as an aid to the understanding of the author's intended effects. Hence his emphasis on the
prologue.

Jones does not use the material in the prologue "against" the governess, however, as do critics such
as Goddard and Rubin. Instead, he sees this often used device of "story within a story" as intended
to produce a greater verisimilitude--as the reader is drawn into "the circle around the fire" with
Douglas and his Christmas guests. Furthermore, such a device, suggests Jones, can "establish an
illusion of reality" (112) by distancing the author from the improbable supernatural events to be
related. "The skeptic may scoff at the ghosts, the haunting, the sorcery: but James answers--here is
the `document'" (112-113). Furthermore, Douglas can "set the stage" for the governess. Thus, the
prologue, which has so often been used to support non-apparitionist readings, Jones uses to support
an apparitionist reading.

The all-pervasive ambiguity of the story Jones sees as the result of a rendition by a first person
narrator who is not omniscient. As she reasons from incomplete evidence, according to Jones, she
involves the reader in her story--and the effects of suspense and fear are thereby necessarily
heightened. Jones also admits a pervasive ambiguity about the precise evil of the ghosts and
suggests that part of the horror arises as the reader is forced to fill in the blanks from his own
experience--i.e., "imagine the details for himself" (118). Inconsistently, however, he then criticizes
Freudian critics for their "excessive ingenuity" (117) in so doing--citing, for instance, Freudian
counters to the apparitionist "identification scene" argument which, he believes, illegitimately go
outside the text by assuming, for example, that Flora described Quint to the governess before the
first appearance (Cargill's position) or that the governess learned about Quint from trips to the
nearby village (Silver's position) (121).

Also, Jones--in stating that the governess cannot be a "pathological liar" because then everything
in the story would be subject to disbelief and James would be "violating the rules of the craft"
(122)--fails to appreciate Edel's suggestion that the story, with its unreliable narrator, is, perhaps,
representative of a new genre, the "psychological novel," which might have new "rules."

We find this same emphasis on technique rather than content in the criticism of Muriel West. In
her outstanding article, "The Death of Miles in the Turn of the Screw," West suggests that the
physical violence of the governess is the cause of Miles's death and that, in the final scene of the
story, the governess succumbs to possession by Quint. West concentrates, in advancing this thesis,
on a close analysis of "the governess's method of telling her story" as she relates the final
happenings between herself and Miles:

the serene, dignified dialogue (provocative, however, as a drawn-out bit of back fence gossip)
presents an easily followed narrative thread that tends to obscure the nervous excitement and rash
physical activity constituting the more intricately woven background fabric of the tapestry (284).

Anent this, in New Critical style, she cites other evidence from the text--pertaining, for example, to
the apparent physical size and strength of the governess. West also details numerous ambiguities of
language (pronoun references, for example, which are unclear) to demonstrate that the governess
may be possessed throughout the story, may become possessed at the end as Miles becomes
dispossessed, and may be responsible for killing Miles.

West reminds us of how, early in the final encounter, the governess "`sprang straight up, reduced...
to the mere blind movement of getting hold of him, drawing him close...'" and, in the process "`fell
for support against the nearest piece of furniture...'" (283). Reminding us of how the governess
"enfolds him, draws him close - and so close she can feel `in the sudden fever of his little body the
tremendous pulse of his little heart,'" West suggests thatwe may pause to wonder how tight a
young woman of twenty would have to squeeze a boy of ten to feel the fever in his body and the
beating of his heart; hard enough, we may suppose, to hurt him... (284).

Pointing to the governess's admission that, during the conversation about his difficulties at school,
she "`for pure tenderness - shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all for nothing, he had
condemned [her] to months of torment,'" West suggests that "her shaking is vigorous enough to
cause him pain that is physical rather than mental" and that this is why the boy looks "`in vague
pain all around the top of the room' and draws `his breath, two or three times over, as if with
difficulty'" (285). West also directs our attention to "Miles's white face, the dew of sweat on his
forehead..." (285).

Toward the end of the encounter, West points out, the governess tell us more about what she has
been saying than about what she has been doing.

But his continued struggle for air, and particularly, his being at her `in a white rage' forcibly
suggest that the earlier `desolation of his surrender' has left him. We can picture him fighting her
now, struggling to free himself from her clothes - whatever they might be subsequent to her
`veritable leap.' The abyss of shadow is too deep for us to make out an armlock, a scissors hold, a
side chancery, or a full or a half-Nelson. Whatever she is doing (most probably her action shifts
from moment to moment), she presents us with a strangely confused description of Miles's
response: `His face gave again, round the room, its convulsed supplication'... Is his `supplication'
convulsed? Or his `)face('? (286).

That the governess succumbs to possession, West maintains, is suggested by numerous syntactical
ambiguities.

`"No more, no more, no more! I shrieked to my visitant as I tried to press him against me...' What
does she mean by `him' - Miles or her `visitant'? Does she know which is which? From this point
on her speeches lose a good measure of their earlier composure and clarity (286).

Later in the encounter, "the ambiguities become even more complex - well-nigh indecipherable."
West directs our attention to the following passage "as a supreme example of James's `amusement'
in creating reader wonder with ambiguity...": "`What does he matter now, my own? - what will he
ever matter? I have you,' I launched at the beast, `but he has lost you forever!' Then, for the
demonstration of my work, `there there!' I said to Miles." West points out that the governess "uses
the word `launched' in a way that could be construed as a speech-label meaning `said vigorously,'
or as an action-word meaning `threw myself.'" Even more importantly, however, we cannot tell if
she is speaking )to( Miles or to the `beast'--who is now, fantastically, diffused throughout the room
`like the taste of poison...' If she is speaking to the `beast,' then she is saying that )she( `has him';
that is, she now is `possessed,' and Miles at last is free of a supposed `possession' by an evil spirit...
her last words echo the possession theme: `his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.' On the other
hand, if she is speaking throughout to Miles, she says she has )him( (at the same time she gives the
`beast' a kick or a push) and she consequently is the `possessing' agent--an end-result she has long
desired. When he earlier rebuffed her (on the occasion of her visit to his bedroom), saying (though
`ever so gently') that he wants her to `let' him `alone,' she continues to `linger beside him' and
question him. When she senses `a small faint quaver of consenting consciousness,' she says: `It
made me drop on my knees beside the bed and seize once more the chance of possessing him'
(286-287).

West is at pains to argue that these ambiguities have been deliberately created. In so doing she
considers other fictional works in the Jamesian canon, comparing the governess's physical
behavior with that of the haunted Spencer Brydon in "The Jolly Corner" (287-288) and contrasting
the "good health and sound heart" of Miles, "which are never questioned in the tale," with "James's
other stories concluding with the death of the young boy (`The Pupil' and `The Author of
Beltraffio')" in which "we are prepared by earlier accounts of the boy's health to accept his final
death" (283). She also cites statements James made about the story, particularly his designation of
the novella (in a letter to Paul Bourget) as "an exercise in the art of not appearing to oneself to fail"
(286) and his distinction (in the Preface to Volume 12 of the New York Edition) between the
governess's "crystalline...record of so many intense anomalies and obscurities" and "her
interpretation of them, a different matter" (283).

West does not attempt to derive any psychological, philosophical, or theological messages from
the ambiguities she has divined--the all-pervasive ambiguity is there for its own sake:

to pursue the comparisons further would go far beyond our present purpose which has been,
simply, to read )The Turn of the Screw( with more than `some' attention... We might force
ourselves to attempt a definition of what precisely ails the governess, thus tearing rough (and
futilely perhaps) at the veils of ambiguity and abysses of shadow that form the `clothing - or much
of it - of the )effects( that constitute the material' of Henry James's art (288).

This, however, is not West's intention - her aim is only to demonstrate an irreducible ambiguity
and show how James produced it.

Let it suffice, then, to conclude by saying: In the final section of )The Turn of the Screw( the
governess indulges in an exuberant debauch of violence that contributes to the sudden death of the
little Miles - or dreams that she did (288).

Louis D. Rubin bluntly declares that "the whole point about the puzzle is its ultimate insolubility"
("One More Turn" 328) and proceeds to shed what light he can on the manner in which James has
constructed this "insoluble" conundrum, developing in the process the possible identity between
Douglas and Miles which Collins had suggested.

Rubin, however, calls attention to one important additional point, a syntactical ambiguity in
Douglas's statement "It was long ago, and this episode was long before." Rubin suggests that the
"episode" may not be the twenty-year-old governess's relationship with Miles and Flora, but,
rather, her interaction with Douglas when he met her during his summer vacation from Trinity.

The syntax is ambiguous. He appears to be making Douglas say that the episode in question took
place long before Douglas knew the governess. But grammatically at least there is also the
possibility that `it was long ago' could refer to the time when the woman sent the manuscript to
Douglas, or perhaps when she died, so that `this episode was long before' may be the time when
the story itself took place (316).

Rubin suggests that, if the real story is the encounter between the governess and Douglas rather
than the ghostly encounters recorded in her manuscript, the latter might be seen as an allegorical
account which an unmarried, middle-aged woman sent to a man shortly before her death, a man
with whom she had once been in love when he was still a boy, in order to tell him about that love.
It would then be, in short, an allegory of love, as it were, the application of which the governess
intended for her now-grown lover to guess. This would indeed go far toward accounting for
Douglas's extreme concern over the whole thing in the prologue (319-320).

In other words, "the story Douglas reads, supposedly about another little boy and the governess, is
in fact about him" (318). This possibility would later, in 1979, be developed at greater length by
Sr. Marcella M. Holloway, C.S.J. Holloway, however, argues that Douglas is Miles in order to call
attention to what she perceives to be the psychological and philosophical themes of the
novella--"the tragedy of love repressed," as well as the destructiveness of that neurotic love with
which the governess envelopes Miles and which she would have inflicted on Douglas, to her own
detriment as well as his, had their love evolved into an overt relationship. Holloway's emphasis,
accordingly, is on the themes of the work rather than on the ambiguous effects themselves. Rubin,
in contrast, is not interested in searching for philosophical or psychological insights but, rather, in
demonstrating that, if we accept the possible identity of Douglas and Miles, "the whole basis for
believing in the governess's narrative is seriously undercut" (318) and the tale's ambiguity is all-
pervasive.

Collins's article had concentrated exclusively on the possible identity of Douglas and Miles. Rubin,
however, includes this possible identity as one item in as long list of examples of elements in the
narrative which, taken together, demonstrate "what a master James was at the deliberate creation of
ambiguity with the very syntax of his prose..." (326). Rubin cites apparent "lies" told by the
governess: her assertion to Mrs. Grose in chapter seven that "Flora saw" Miss Jessel across the
lake, which appears to contradict the account in chapter six; her later description of "the portentous
little activity by which [Flora] sought to divert attention" from the apparition, which contradicts
her earlier description of Flora's absorption in the task in making a boat out of two pieces of wood;
her identification of the man looking through the window --whom she describes in detail - with the
man previously seen on the tower at twilight when they were "too far apart to call to one another"
and thus, when "to have made out such details would be... too remarkable for anyone to believe"
(323); her assertion to Mrs. Grose in chapter sixteen that Miss Jessel had spoken in the
schoolroom, which contradicts the preceding chapter's description of her encounter with the silent
specter. Rubin also, in discussing the death of Miles, cites an interesting ambiguity which West
had missed:

Does( Miles actually pronounce the name? How can we be sure it is Miles, and not she, who asks,
`It's )he(?' If the question is hers, then Miles, not the governess, answers, `Whom do you mean by
"he"?' And, in that event, it would not be Miles, but the governess herself, who speaks the next
sentence: `Peter Quint - you devil!' Not once does James write, `I said,' or `he asked.' Direct
identification of the speakers is missing. I cannot think that in these crucial sentences of dialogue,
he did this unintentionally (327).

Rubin does not suggest, however, that the points he has made add up to a conclusive interpretation
of the story. Douglas may or may not be Miles--the similarities and syntactical ambiguities suggest
but do not prove. Flora may have seen Jessel and then turned her back to the water, or the
governess - after seeing the apparition--may have seen the little girl looking across the lake and
then may have omitted the latter observation from her account in chapter six, or she may have
known through extrasensory perception that Flora perceived Miss Jessel. Similarly, she may, in the
schoolroom, have been able to read the apparition's mind so accurately that the ghost might as well
have spoken--hence, perhaps, her ambiguous "It came to that." All of these possible conjectures
demonstrate that "the whole story is to be doubted, and we can be certain of nothing" (326). This is
why "we have had theory after theory proposed as the answer ... and there is still no single
explanation which satisfies everyone" (314).

Rubin, like so many other critics, cites passages from James's writings about The Turn of the
Screw and refers to patterns elsewhere in James's fictional canon to prove that a particular reading
of the story is in accord with the author's intentions. Thus, commenting on the striking similarities
between Douglas and Miles, Rubin opines that "we can usually assume that when Henry James
does something in a novel, he has a reason for doing so" (319). He relates the governess's
misleading statements to the rest of James's canon:

I do not recall who it was who once said that one can never properly understand a James novel
until he realizes that all the characters are liars, but it is a very perceptive remark, provided that
one realizes that there are various kinds of liars (319).

Rubin--like Kenton, Edel, Collins, and Levy, among others--attempts to peek into James's psyche
as the author imagined his readers' reactions to the story he was creating:

One can imagine him chuckling at the whole thing. A triumph of craft indeed, of precisely the sort
that he most enjoyed. For had he not accomplished just what he said he wanted to do: renovate a
supposedly outmoded story form, the tale of horror? ... He had transformed the psychotic
hallucinations of an obsessed woman into a drama of the supernatural, made us believe both in the
ghosts and obsession, until we could not be sure which was true. How thorough the ambiguity he
attained...! The further we try to extend the meanings of a passage, a scene, the more elusive the
answer. How often one finds oneself, after weighing all the evidence, coming to the same
conclusion: `It could be either' (327).

Rubin does not, however, turn the doorknob he seems to have brushed against--he does not, like
Edel and Levy, psychoanalyze James to discover hidden motives for the wish to effect such
ambiguity. Instead, he portrays James simply as an artful entertainer rejoicing in the creation of a
new form of entertainment: a ghost story which "has led us along first one trail and then another,
until finally we have doubled back upon ourselves and are just where we started" (326).

Indeed, Rubin seems uninterested in opening any philosophical, theological, or psychological

doors. He seems to accept Poe's assumptions that the purpose of art is entertainment and the
critical task is to point out in what way and how well the purpose has been achieved. His article
ends with praise for the work as eminently successful entertainment:

Carefully, stroke by stroke, he built his riddle, spread his hints, told and denied, held us. The
evening's entertainment he prepared for those fortunate readers of )Collier's( magazine sixty-five
years ago remains as fresh as on the day it was written. `The art of the romancer,' James once
wrote, `is, "for the fun of it," insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him.' We
are still trying to determine where it was that he did it (328).

Rubin adopts a similar approach to the novella in The Teller and the Tale, asserting that James

with consummate artistry has led us off in one direction after another, with the trial constantly
doubling back on itself, so that we are confronted finally with the personality of the author (101).

Rubin's emphasis in this study is on the construction of various narrative voices and their
relationship to their authors. His point here is that James "schemed to present a conjuncture" by
constructing a narrator who "did not know how to conceal what she had to conceal if we were to
believe her" (101).

Donald P. Costello, too, declined to take sides in the dispute between apparitionists and non-
apparitionists--maintaining that such debates arise from an irreducible ambiguity which the author
has deliberately embedded in the very structure of the story in order to produce in the reader a dual
effect of mystification and terror. Costello's purpose, accordingly, is not to affirm one side or the
other of that controversy because such interpretations, in their single-minded insistence upon the
completeness of their reading of the story, have robbed it of a whole dimension... either taken
away its ability to mystify... or robbed it of what James called its `dear old sacred terror.' ... Any
interpretation that takes away the ghosts weakens the story's ability to horrify; any interpretation
that takes away the reader's uncertainty weakens the story's ability to mystify (312-313).

Costello does not attempt to derive any philosophical or other themes from this irreducible
ambiguity. His purpose, rather, is to demonstrate "that a close examination of the structure of The
Turn of the Screw will indicate that James so built his tale as to make it both to puzzle the reader
and to horrify him..." (312). In other words, Costello is interested in narrative structure rather than
meaning.

Costello contends that "this double effect" is engendered by the juxtaposition of factual
"representations"--including accurate statements of what the governess sees--and dubious
"interpretations" of these data--statements, for example, that her visions are supernatural rather
than hallucinatory. Accordingly, "scenes in which the governess represents the action usually
result in horror; scenes in which the governess interprets the action usually result in mystification"
(313). While the latter are "in James' words, `challengeable' (313), the former are "exceedingly
specific and detailed" so that they are likely to be "accepted as real and hence horrible..." (319).
Most helpfully, Costello provides a detailed chart consisting of "a scene-by-scene breakdown of
the entire book according to representational and interpretive scenes" (319).

Costello provides another chart to show how the various incidents fit together in an interrelated
and suspenseful pattern. This chart divides the story into "thirteen... sequences of structure" (314).
In each sequence an incident and its interpretation are preceded by a "foretelling" or introduction
by the governess and followed by some plan of action which connects the sequence to later events
in the story.

The first sequence, for example, concerns the governess's receipt of the letter stating that Miles
will not be allowed to return to his boarding school. The "foretelling" is as follows: "The first day
had been, on the whole, as I have expressed, reassuring, but I was to see it wind up to a change of
note." The incident--the result of the letter--is followed by her interpretation--first she concludes
that Miles must be "an injury to the others" and then is merely bewildered. Her plan is "not to
mention the letter to the Master or to Miles but simply to `see it out'" (315). This fourfold structure
obtains throughout the first twelve "sequences"; in the thirteenth sequence, however, the emotional
confrontation between Miles and the governess is followed, not by interpretation, but by the final
incident--the death of Miles. "For the first time," in other words, the Incident (the second element
in the structure pattern) leads directly to a consequent incident, with no interpretation by the
governess, and no further plan of action, and no overlapping foretelling. The forward thrust is over,
and the story ends (318).

We find this same emphasis on technique rather than content in Muriel West's brilliant book-length
source study, A Stormy Night with The Turn of the Screw. In this work West's fictional narrator
discovers in the novella a bewildering plethora of sources and other "literary influences."

For example, the narrator discerns in the story "the most characteristic, the most typical, of the
stock situations and devices of the gothic" (5) which seem to be exaggerated "in the Northanger
Abbey tradition" (14) but which, on closer inspection, are "not what one might expect in a satire in
the Northanger Abbey tradition" because "they are too accurate, too clinical..." (23).

Similarly, the narrator calls attention to various biblical motifs but, upon closer examination,
realizes that their inclusion in the story raises questions without providing answers. There are, for
instance, elements suggestive of the First Book of Samuel stories about David and Saul and the
Witch of Endor (recall that the governess compares Miles playing the piano for her to "David
playing for Saul") which seem to be deliberately inserted into the novella but which engender
nagging, unformulated notions... and questions: why did Miles have to die? There couldn't be any
sensible connection between his playing the part of David, for David was old and stricken in years
before he slept with his fathers and was buried in the City of David (18-19).

Likewise, the abnormal silences and distortions of the normal experience of time which
characterize her visions are reminiscent of "old accounts of prophets, saints, monks and witches
who `saw things' or `heard voices,'" including "the other Saul (the one whose names was changed
to Paul on his conversion)" and "John of Patmos who witnessed the opening of the seventh seal...
after `silence in heaven about the space of half an hour'" (21-22). These silences and time
distortions, however, also suggest as possible sources the pathological experiences recorded in
psychological and psychiatric writings such as Freud and Breuer's Studies in Hysteria, Braid's
Neurypnology, or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep, and, of course, William James's Principles of
Psychology (320-329).

Finally, to add to the confusion, the "scientific" sources include not only material concerning
psychopathology but also the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research and, indeed, "all
the thinking of the Gay Nineties on unexplained phenomena... men like Myers, Podmore, and
Gurney--not to mention Henry James's brother William.." (33-35). Furthermore, in addition to
"scientific" material concerning the supernatural, the narrator finds traces of "elves and fairies
from folklore and Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream" (53-60).

After compiling this large combination of "sources" and "influences," the narrator at last concludes
that no thematic pattern can be conveyed--that, instead--we have in The Turn of the Screw a
dream--a nightmare perhaps--the reality of which exceeds what psychoanalysts would call its
manifest content--although West does not use that terminology:

if )The Turn of the Screw( is ... just a dream (or nightmare) I needn't `go about to expound' those
parts of it that didn't come clear. For, as Bottom the Weaver says (on waking after Puck has
removed the ass's head and the spell): `Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound the dream...
man is but a patch'd fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had.' I had already been such an
ass, but I didn't care. I was glad not to have to go on puzzling about ambiguities and
inconsistencies that in a dream world would make good enough sense (57).

The dream, however, is not only the reader's dream but also the governess's dream--and here, in
her discussion of James's technique, West adds a novel twist--"another turn," if you will. For at
least some of the literary influences--the Gothic effects, in particular, are referred to in the
governess's discussion of her reading (she mentions The Mystery of Udolpho, for example). Thus,
part of the ambiguity arises, West suggests, from the contrast between what may really have
happened at Bly and the governess's interpretations stemming from her "already lively
imagination" (7) which has been "stimulated by long sessions of reading, to satisfy the `curiosity
of her youth,' about the horrible villainy of mankind" (9). The prologue, then, becomes important
in understanding

how the trick was played. James had it all thought out ahead of time. His intermediate narrator,
Douglas, plants some of the unexciting truths that the novel-devouring governess ignores, or
develops to suit her own taste-her taste for sensational novels where the most innocent-seeming
people turn out to be villains of the deepest dye--much as (according to some people) all cats are
black at heart (15).

John J. Enck, too, considers the novella's ambiguities to be both irreducible and inherent in its
structure. He, therefore, urges us to "read The Turn of the Screw not to discern whether the
governess either tells objectively what happens or occasionally deceives herself but, rather
simultaneously for both likelihoods" (262).

Enck agrees with Edel's contention in The Psychological Novel that The Turn of the Screw must
be seen as a representative of a new genre in which ambiguity is deliberately engendered. He is
thus, like Edel, an historical genre critic. Indeed, the failure to recognize to what genre The Turn of
the Screw belongs is, in Enck's view, responsible for the long debate between apparitionists and
non-apparitionists. Enck, however, takes Edel's point a step further--seeing the novella not only as
a representative of a new literary genre but as "part of an international revolt in aesthetics" (259)
which included musicians, painters, and sculptors as well as writers. Accordingly, Enck compares
the tale's ambiguity to that found in the opera Ariadne auf Naxos and, in discussing the ambiguities
of The Turn of the Screw, employs similes from both music and sculpture. In discussing the
interaction between the children and the governess he suggests that one must catch Miles's and
Flora's accents as a kind of chorus and then the woman's perhaps malevolent keening which floats
over them. The effect, no more than in atonal compositions which likewise found congenial the
tempo at the turn of the century, becomes not a cacophony but releases new harmonics (263).

In a similar vein, Enck suggests,

Instead of envisaging the governess, Miles, and Flora as `rounded' figures, one might more
profitably borrow another simile form sculpture; less like objects rendered in the round, they
resemble elements of a mobile whose relationships, if restricted, constantly shift or, for a turn-of-
the-century metaphor, commonplace items depicted abstractly and from several angles cubistically
(262-263).

Enck does not, like West in A Stormy Night, pinpoint numerous literary sources for the novella.
He would, however, be sympathetic to West's approach; for the "intended revolt in aesthetics"
(259) to which he calls attention was founded, he contends, on the self-conscious awareness that
true art does not, cannot, incorporate `reality' (or life), but instead, refers to itself and its own
nature. Concomitantly, the experimenters, shunning earlier romantics' empty phantasies, teasingly
drew upon cliches from literature, experience, or legends, or society but inverted or caricatured
them...purified of all personal and explanatory touches. To offer these constructs in full rigor
artists stressed not the subject but the media in which they worked: paint, notes, marble, or words...
Finally, the total impact, balanced by the uncommitted ambiguities, sought not to reassure but to
disturb (260).

Accordingly, Enck would be neither surprised nor disturbed by the bewildering variety of
"sources"--from the bible to Gothic novels to the writings of psychoanalysts and
parapsychologists--which West's fictional narrator divined in The Turn of the Screw and by the
failure of these diverse elements to fit together in a coherent thematic pattern. Such "futile
squabbles" over themes, says Enck, arise from unhistorical readings which assume "that twentieth-
century artists just perpetuate, often less effectually, outlooks inherited from the nineteenth" (260).
We see here also, as in West's book, the influence of one of the central ideas of structuralism--that
the world of literature is self-contained and self-referential.

In his discussion of James's technique, Enck isolates in the narrative "four strata," a distinction to
Costello's representation-interpretation dichotomy. Enck lists these levels as follows:

those which admit little room for doubt, such as setting, season, external traits of character, and the
background; those which the governess perhaps misinterprets, such as her own feelings or the tone
in dialogue; those highly suspect, such as the extent of Miles's and Flora's depravity; those which
could be downright wrong, such as the ghosts....While investigating these four levels...one should
remember that on all of them through his usual stylistic devices James conscientiously permits
readers to follow until, suddenly, the obviously objective dissolves in misstatements (263).

Thus, as so many other critics--among them, Rubin and Trachtenberg-have pointed out, a great
part of the story's effect lies in reversals of the reader's expectations. Enck summarizes the
governess's presentation in this way:

Her position initially accommodates all the trite aspects which usually enhance such a figure: a
touch of Cinderella, an enchanted house, charming security in the classroom, and a charitable
loyalty to a master. By a few breathtaking strokes James neatly undercuts the cliches and so invests
them with a sinister power...While she repeatedly stresses her frantic grimaces, her firmness with
Mrs. Grose, her courageous independence, and her constant fidelity something less (or more) than
she claims to reveal about herself emerges between the lines (264).
The following are representative examples of the "slight but indicative details" which infect the
governess's narrative with an "evasive duplicity":

...while discussing what Flora stares at on the lawn, she describes the spying place: `a large, square
chamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, [of] extravagant size....I had often admired it and
I knew my way about in it'--not a privately edifying practice. Indeed, her vainly repeated `There,
there, there' to Flora pointing out Miss Jessel and the same words directed at Miles for Peter Quint
mark her as seldom auspiciously enlightening (265).

Enck's criticism is expressly technical rather than thematic. In his view the work "...needs no
excuse beyond its aesthetic perfection" (268). Perhaps paradoxically, however, Enck seems to find
a philosophical lesson precisely in the story's refusal to yield a definitive reading--i.e., in the very
intractability of its ambiguity:

The Turn of the Screw( implacably tempts everyone into judgments--rash or laboriously reasoned.
Nevertheless, as with most of James's later books, the closer the reading, the more one's sensitivity
increases about the difficulty of all decisions: how very tenuous one's estimate of others--and one's
self--must in civilized fairness be. The most solid appearance may dissolve as illusory to unmask
irremediable horrors; an impeccable worship of `truth' (or `goodness' or `beauty') can conceal a
temple to evil. One locks back at Bly and its unconventional inhabitants repeatedly because one
cannot, dare not, make the final pronouncement. Whatever anxiety such hesitancy causes
disappears in part because of the wholeness which art alone provides; one learns to suspend
judgment (268-269).

2. Ambiguity Intended to Convey Philosophical, Theological, or Psychological

Themes
A. Trachtenberg

Stanley Trachtenberg, for example, accepts Rubin's arguments that Douglas and Miles are the
same person and then proceeds to demonstrate how this shared identity functions as a vehicle for
what Trachtenberg takes to be the novella's central moral message, the dreadfulness of secret sin
and the overwhelming need for confession.

The real focus of the story, says Trachtenberg, is Miles, not the governess. The apparent centrality
of the governess, he suggests, was James's technical way of solving "two salient" problems:

How to make his terror terrible enough, and how--since it depends principally upon withheld
knowledge--to keep the mysterious from becoming merely murky . . . . He wanted to avoid
reducing his evil to the particular and yet maintain enough substance to give it conviction. To do
this, he had first to objectify the evil in emotionally believable terms. The reader's imagination
would build from there. The governess' reaction provided just such an objectification, embodying
the evil by presenting it as an effect rather than a direct phenomenon. The reader could experience
her horror first hand at the same time as he was thrust one remove from its cause (181-82).

According to Trachtenberg, the novella is the story of "the guilt . . . of a boy whose unspecified
corruption, personified as sinister specters, festered as he attempted to conceal it" (182).
Trachtenberg contrasts Miles, who is continually "wanting to expose his own guilt and lacking the
courage to do so" with Flora, whose "eventual damnation" as she "symbolically dies, an old
woman," occurs because she "lacks entirely these moments of self doubt" (181). Miles's "recurrent
insomnia," on the other hand,

. . . exposes a conscience corroded by the difficulty he experiences in trying to articulate his guilt.
It is at this moment that the governess, detecting the first sign of his `consenting consciousness,'
almost succeeds in obtaining his confession. He forestalls her by blowing out the candle, and thus
consigns himself to a darkness of the soul from which it requires a lifetime to emerge (181).

In the prologue, Trachtenberg correctly points out, we see

. . . a man engaged in a fierce moral struggle. The confession does not come easily. The
constricting fear, which had marked the pattern of a lifetime, is difficult to overcome; the
continuing urge to postpone exposure is tempting. Even as he reaches out for it, Douglas' salvation
threatens to recede, the story to remain untold. There is a final hesitation, against which he
appeared, to the acute narrator, `almost to appeal for aid. He had broken a thickness of ice, the
formation of many a winter; he had reasons for a long silence' (181).

Consequently, his story is

. . . a story not only of the corruptibility of children, but of the continued guilt of silence, which
results in a symbolic deathbed confession, while the attending guests perform a priestlike
absolution around the cleansing fire of the hearth (182).

B. Clair

John A. Clair also attempts to demonstrate how a particular narrative method is intended to convey
a certain theme. Clair focuses on

James's utilization of a formal ironic device of the stage--dramatic irony--by which actors or
characters are shown to be `blind' to facts known by the spectators and readers . . . . His consistent
use of dramatic irony in successive scenes very often provides a complex ironic vehicle for a
cumulative ironic effect (x).

The purpose of these "formal or functional ironic effects" is the conveyance of a particular view of
human life, which Clair terms "thematic irony" (x). Clair's criticism is authorial in that he attempts
to understand the canon as a whole.

Clair's reading of The Turn of the Screw focuses on the governess's misinterpretation of those
"intense anomalies and obscurities" which she witnesses. These misinterpretations, Clair suggests,
are deliberately abetted by the deceptive Mrs. Grose (37-58). So far, so good. Aldrich and Rees (to
be discussed later in this chapter) have done some good work in removing the "saintly" Mrs. Grose
from her pedestal. Other critics--for example, Cole and Cranfill and Clark, among others--have
concentrated on likely misunderstandings in the governess's conversations with Mrs. Grose. And,
of course, many critics have suggested that the governess in some way misinterprets what she sees
(Bontly, for example, suggests that the apparitions may be innocuous spirits).

Clair's specific reconstruction of the events at Bly, however, is breathtaking in its implausibility.
He suggests that the children's insane mother is hidden at Bly, attended by a male guardian,
without the knowledge of the new and strange governess but with the full knowledge of the
completely trusted Mrs. Grose. Thus, the two figures seen by the governess are this insane woman,
when she periodically escapes, and her guardian, who then looks for her. Mrs. Grose's stories are
designed to keep the strange new governess from learning the truth, so as to protect the family
from embarrassment. She denies seeing Miss Jessel on the other side of the lake in order to keep
Flora, as well as the governess, in the dark.

The numerous and overwhelming objections to this interpretation are too obvious to need a
detailed statement; nevertheless, a few brief comments are in order. There is so little in the story to
support this interpretation that Clair, in effect, has written his own story. The apparitions in James's
story quickly and mysteriously disappear--they do not leave the scene the way real people would.
Furthermore, it would be highly unlikely in Victorian Britain that an insane woman would be
assigned a male guardian. The employer, moreover, if he were so desirous of secrecy in such a
matter, would be unlikely to leave the insane woman at Bly while placing an unknowledgeable
stranger "in supreme authority." Aldrich has succinctly summed up some of the most telling
objections to Clair's interpretation:

. . . it depends on the assumption that the uncle keeps Miss Jessel and the children in the same
household and at the same time sets up elaborate precautions against their encountering one
another--and that he informs his housekeeper of the circumstances, but conceals them from the
housekeeper's superior. The motivation for this behavior is absent, and I do not believe that James
would have based his plot on such a contrived set of circumstances (377).

C. Sharp

The Confidante in Henry James by Sister M. Corona Sharp, O.S.U. is, to some extent, a
psychoanalytic study which focuses on the psyche of James himself. Sharp claims that his use of
widowed or maiden older women as confidantes is at least partially traceable to the "matriarchal
system" of the novelist's family of origin and its lifelong effects on his unconscious.

The mother's powerful influence on the entire family and on Henry in particular is related in Leon
Edel's biography. It was a tense control, masked by loving devotion, which in the biographer's
eyes, preferred the second son to the first and was responsible for the eventual breakdown of the
younger children. The power-seeking mothers of James's fiction are the unconscious recreations of
his mother's concealed force; for consciously James could only idealize her (xiii).

The resulting "crippling in the boy's development toward emotional maturity," suggests Sharp,
goes far toward explaining both his lifelong bachelorhood and his asexual friendships with older
women such as Edith Wharton and Grace Norton. These psychodynamic realities also partially
explain his pervasive use of such women as confidantes to the protagonists in his fiction, although
Sharp emphasizes James's debts to confidants in fictional works such as Wuthering Heights and his
"study and practice of the drama" which ". . . did much to influence the techniques in his
fiction . . . the majority of his confidantes appear in works written during or after his dramatic
years, 1890-1895" (xii).

Sharp's approach is authorial in that she surveys the entire Jamesian canon. "In each case," she tells
us in her introduction, the type, the character, and the technical function is investigated, and
parallels and contrasts are noted . . . . Each confidante contributes to the total picture, and all are
integrally related to the narrative method of the author (xxx).

Sharp finds that her psychoanalytic insights are more directly applicable to some confidantes than
to others. Sharp sees in Mrs. Grose "the kindness of [James's] motherly friends" (xxi) but then
discusses her as a technical narrative device without further reference to psychoanalytic insights.
Accordingly, we have chosen to include Sharp's study not with the psychoanalytic studies of the
period but rather with those studies which attempt to describe how a particular technical narrative
method of engendering ambiguity is intended to convey a thematic message. It is easy to see why
Sharp would not find in Mrs. Grose a convincing example of James's unconscious mother fixation.
In the first place, Sharp does not see the hostility toward the governess which Aldrich perceives.
Secondly, Mrs. Grose seems markedly different from James's mother both in social standing and in
a lack of aggressiveness which makes her easy prey for the governess's bullying.

Sharp reads the novella straightforwardly as a tale of supernatural evil so profound that it eludes
rational understanding. Consequently, she holds that James deliberately, as he asserts in the
Preface, sought ambiguity,

. . . to give the sense `Of their being, the haunting pair, capable, as the phrase is, of everything--
that is of exerting, in respect to the very worst action small victims so conditioned might be
conceived as subject to' (46).

Furthermore, "the . . . opacity of Mrs. Grose's perceptions is functional in safeguarding ambiguity,"

says Sharp (46), because "her character presents the stolidity of the English serving class as a foil
to the governess's acute sensibility" (41). She functions as the chief means of dramatization . . . . In
the course of their relation . . . the governess comes to lean more and more on her confidante, and
without her substantial support one feels that the young woman would have collapsed. But as this
support is seen to be qualified by a latent opposition to the governess, the housekeeper reflects the
conflicts and ambiguity of the whole nouvelle. . . (41).

Far from understanding depths of evil, Mrs. Grose can only perceive superficial manifestations
such as Flora's language or Miles's possible theft of letters.

. . . as an English servant she clings to manners, the external elements that make for security within
the social system. When these are disturbed the universe of Mrs. Grose crashes . . . . `He stole
letters!' she reiterates, trying to make an impression with her keenness . . . . It would certainly be
an offense for a little gentleman to steal letters; and Mrs. Grose is satisfied with that . . . (45).

D. Wright

Walter F. Wright finds insoluble ambiguities in the story. He suggests, like Enck, that these
ambiguities have been deliberately effected to reflect important truths about the human condition--
most importantly that we can never know the whole truth and yet must act in contexts where
mistaken action can bury us in guilt. James termed the tale a fairy tale, according to Wright,
because of its "universal implications" (178). The governess's plight is our plight; her ghosts are
our ghosts because "the governess's concern about them is symbolic of our own philosophic
predicaments" (181).

This dilemma concerns the ghosts' "relation to the children" (181). Wright maintains that the
economy of the story requires us to accept the existence of the ghosts.

Unless one tries to argue that everything was a concoction of a distraught mind, one has to begin
by accepting certain premises, among them the possibility that ghosts can exist . . . . Nothing of
philosophic significance can be made of them as obvious fantasies of a neurotic mind . . . . The
governess reports that she sees them . . . . As she surveys the happenings years later, when she is
actually recording from memory, she gives to the appearance of the ghosts the same credence as to
other things her eyes saw. If we accept these other phenomena, we cannot well exempt the ghosts
(181).

The ghosts' "relation to the children," however, poses a terrible ethical problem for the governess
and for us as we attempt to judge her.

If the children are already in their power, the governess is morally responsible for counteracting
their machinations; indeed, she should take any risk, for all is lost if she does not succeed. If, on
the other hand, the children are ignorant of their existence, the governess has no right to unveil
their eyes to such evil: `. . . who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should go
unhung, if by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first to introduce into our perfect
intercourse an element so dire' . . . . Hence her dilemma. If the children would freely confess to
their association with the ghosts, her moral course would be clear. But how can she obtain from
them a confession they decline to offer without herself speaking of the `element so dire'? If she
does speak first--even if she then secures a confession from the children, who may see only
because she has helped them to see--she will never know whether she has offered salvation to
captive spirits or whether she is beyond absolution for her sin (181-82).

Wright, like the other critics we have been considering, offers a detailed analysis of the narrative
method James has employed to produce this all-pervasive ambiguity.

Wright lists those elements in the plot which have given rise to "three perspectives":

At one extreme is the critic who sees the governess as a virtually angelic being fighting against
evil, and at the other is the antipuritan who would make of her a self-appointed vicegerent of the
Lord, driven by a misguided frenzy and guilty of bringing evil into a garden formerly idyllic.
Distinct from the second, yet convinced that the governess is a doer of ill, are those who would
make her out to be a sexually maladjusted spinstress, who unwittingly records in her first-person
narrative the vagaries of a pathological mind (177).

None of these critics are merely wrong; James has deliberately constructed the story so that all
three interpretations are supportable. "All three types of readers cite the same evidence, and on it
all build up substantial superstructures of reason to prove their points" (177). Because the other
two readings can be so easily supported, ". . . each of the three perspectives is . . . not compatible
with economy in storytelling" (177). The wise reader does not exclusively embrace one of the
three perspectives but instead recognizes the insoluble nature of the governess's dilemma and his
own.

E. Shine

Muriel G. Shine also holds that the story is about the ethical problems of acting in the light of
incomplete knowledge. However, Shine is far less sympathetic to the governess than Wright.
While Wright holds that the ghosts are real and that the governess does the best she can under
terribly difficult circumstances, Shine holds that the governess is an example of the wrong way to
seek knowledge. "Fundamentally," says Shine,

the novelist is concerned with the governess' impulse to know and the relationship of that impulse
to the attainment of self-knowledge. In a word, is it enough to desperately want knowledge in
order to gain it? (133).

Shine's answer is no.

A prior condition for the acquisition of knowledge about others is self-knowledge, which, in turn,
implies a recognition of human fallibility. The young governess is sadly deficient in this area. She
never sufficiently questions the reality of the `danger' she senses: `I saw my service so strongly and
so simply. I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and
the most lovable . . . we were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger . . . . I was a
screen--I was to stand before them. The more I saw, the less they would' (134).

Shine is reminiscent of Lydenberg in her suggestion that the governess acts as a conducting rather
than protective screen--i.e., in her suggestion that the destruction occurs through the agency of the
governess. Shine is like Firebaugh in her insistence on the importance of knowledge in this story.
"For James," she says, "the inability to exercise the cognitive faculty is equated with moral
insufficiency" (135). However, Shine's point is somewhat more complex than Firebaugh's simple
indictment of the governess for "denial of knowledge." While Shine arraigns the governess for her
failure to seek knowledge, she maintains that, by an ironic twist--a turn of the screw perhaps?--the
children are destroyed by a perverse knowledge the governess forces on them.

The children do, in fact, `see,'--another instance of James's fascination with the theme of the
reversal of roles. What the children finally come to `see' is the governess' warped personality.

Shine differs from most anti-governess critics in seeing the governess as a normal adolescent
rather than as a pathological case. Shine's book is a study not of "haunted people" but rather of
children in the Jamesian canon. Predictably, Shine sees Miles and Flora as two of many examples
of "children . . . manipulated by adults . . . invariably . . . in the name of some higher ideal
connected with the welfare of the child" (175). Interestingly, however, Shine sees the governess
not as a typical manipulative adult but rather as an adolescent. Shine makes some of the same
points psychoanalytic critics have made--referring, for example, to "her unrealistic infatuation with
the mysterious and almost unknown guardian of the children" (136) and her "frantic effort to
subdue and possess Miles" which arises from "a sexual fantasy" (92). Shine views these elements,
however, in the light of developmental psychology rather than abnormal psychology. The above
reactions, Shine tells us, are "surprisingly reminiscent of adolescents one has known" (136). In
arguing this point, Shine considers the story itself--in New Critical fashion--and the total canon--in
the manner of an authorial critic.

To reduce the governess merely to a `pathological liar' with an `unhinged fancy' robs the tale of its
many dimensions. To elevate her to the role of `confessor' and `savior' with a `priestly' function
attributes a frame of reference to the author which is questionable in the context of the whole body
of his work . . . . A measured regard for her adolescent characteristics might very well have
tempered the more extreme reactions to her (132-33).

Nevertheless, although Shine faults the governess for deplorable judgment, she does not
categorically assert that the children are innocent. On the contrary, the inconclusive evidence
presented. . . serves as a commentary on the essential ambiguity of the human condition and the
interchangeability of appearance and reality in a world where most questions do not have final and
irrevocable answers (139).

This "essential ambiguity" is the result of a meticulous choice of incidents comprising the plot.
The reader can never, with any degree of certainty, say what the children really are, only what they
could possibly be. Miles could be the soul of corruption, and, by the same token, he could be a
typical little Victorian gentleman who minds his manners, is precocious enough to call his
governess `my dear,` and naughty enough to be expelled from school. Flora could be the essence
of depravity, but she could, just as well, be an absorbed child playing with her boat, an anxious
little girl leaving her bed in search of her governess, or a badly frightened infant responding to
incomprehensible and threatening behavior on the part of the adult who cares for her . . . . [James]
succeeded because Miles and Flora are credible as Victorian upper-class children; their credibility
filters through the distorting screen of the governess' perception of them. Because we sense their
normality, we can accept the idea that their behavior could have a deeper and more ominous
significance (138).

This ambiguous situation and the adolescent response to it are presented to convey a theme of
universal significance.

Virtue and vice coexist in each of us. The quality of the individual perception is what truly counts,
for both good and evil reside in the eye of the beholder. Appropriately the author chose two
children and an adolescent to dramatize his theme of the co-presence of virtue and vice in one
entity, because it is a truth of human nature which must be assimilated before the claim to maturity
can be made (139).

Moreover, this theme is conveyed to the reader in a manner more immediate and powerful than
mere intellectual presentation. For the ambiguity of the evidence, suggests Shine, puts the reader in
the same position as the governess. The reader is forced to judge the situation and the children in
the light of his own experience just as the governess is forced to do (138). Here, Shine, like Willen,
is a reader-response critic. This reader-response criticism, however, does not depend on a detailed
analysis of the psychology of a particular reader but rather upon the analysis of the text itself as its
lacunae invite constructions from readers with diverse psychologies. We think immediately of
Felman's later contention that the structure of the story forces the reader to duplicate the
psychological responses of one or more of the characters. Thus, the story serves as a touchstone of
the reader's maturity. The reader either judges simplistically like the adolescent governess or
apprehends the situation's complexity and irreducible ambiguity a la critics such as Enck.

F. Ward

J. A. Ward also sees the story as deliberately ambiguous and contends that the purpose of the
ambiguity is to convey certain philosophical themes. Ward, however, is not completely successful
because some of his points are implied rather than stated specifically. His interpretation,
consequently, tends to break down into two distinct and only loosely related readings. By making
the implied points specific, however, we can construct from his work a unified and persuasive
reading of the story.

Ward, like so many other critics of this period, is authorial in his approach. His understanding of
Jamesian evil is arrived at through consideration of a large number of Jamesian works; and he
places the governess in chronological perspective among James's other protagonists.

As Ward reads the canon, the Jamesian philosophy of evil "represents, if not the synthesis,
certainly the coexistence of a Puritan concern with evil and a transcendentalist concern with
experience" (16). Ward approvingly quotes Siwek's definition of evil:
. . . all that opposes the intrinsic finality of a being . . . all that hinders the being's full development,
all that thwarts its tendencies, all that resists the drive from the depths of that being toward full
expansion, toward that completion which it would attain to in its ideal type, the archetype of its
own nature. . . (vii).

This "implicit identification of good with growth," says Ward, marks James as "fundamentally in
the tradition of nineteenth century romanticism" (vii-viii). "Growth," in the Jamesian world,
requires a plethora of experience. Ward cites examples such as the pathetic end of John Marcher in
"The Beast in the Jungle" and the exhortation of Strether to Bilham in )The Ambassadors(--`Live
all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as
you have your life. . . (14-15).

Consequently, "evil in James usually takes the form of . . . the malign intervention of one person in
the life of another" (vii) to restrict experience and thus restrict growth. James's preoccupation with
evil is Puritan, Ward contends, but Puritan with a novel twist: "James tends to concentrate on the
good man's reaction to evil, rather than on the guilty man's obsession with his own sin" (9). In
other words, "James alters the traditional Puritan consideration of evil by focusing on the sinned-
against rather than the sinner . . . " (14). The main reason for this shift of emphasis, suggests Ward,
is that "the evil character in James is almost never reflective" (10). We see the influence of
transcendentalism in the Jamesian assumption that evil "derives from the fundamental human
condition of limited perception" (11).

The above underlying "malign intervention" is the essence of evil, not specific actions or
omissions considered in themselves. This "is related to James's notion that phenomena are only
important when the private consciousness contains them" (17). Thus, a specific act only becomes
evil as the victim suffers its constricting effects. Both these effects and the actor's motives are
pervasive and mysterious, extending to deep subconscious depths where human beings accept or
reject spiritual growth. Thus, evil is always much more than any particular concrete manifestation;
James often makes this point, Ward suggests, through ambiguity and indetermination.

When James converts the concrete fact of evil into a kind of impalpable essence, the effect is not to
diminish its reality but to intensify it by making it mysterious--even vaguely supernatural. Even
when the nature of a crime is specified, like the duplicity of the Bellegardes or the parasitism of
Gilbert Osmond, the sense of the evil far transcends the recorded facts, for as the evil impresses
itself on the consciousness of the victim, the reader is compelled to realize its full force through the
emotional reaction of the sinned-against. Sometimes, as in `The Turn of the Screw,' the precise
nature of the offense is not told us (16).

The "fairy tale" elements which James referred to in the Preface, serve, says Ward, . . . to
give . . . universal implications . . . . To reveal that beneath the impeccable manners and
sophisticated dialogue of his characters there lurked the most basic of conflicts, that between good
and evil . . . (16).

The governess, according to Ward, resembles those other outsiders or agents of good who frequent
the fiction of James's middle period. Usually characterized as emotionally and intellectually
inadequate, they stand for human imperfection. They are objective portraits of James's conception
of the ineptitude and weakness of good in a world dominated by evil. In addition, they represent a
harsher evaluation of the romantic view of life, based on illusion rather than good sense--a view
shared by James's earlier American protagonists, who do not, however, significantly cause ill to
others (72).
Like Lydenberg, Ward suggests that the governess "helps to damn" the children. Her
overprotective domination--culminating in her brutal encounter with Flora by the lake and with
Miles in the dining room--drive the children into the arms of the ghosts. Ward sees the governess
as possessed by pride and concerned almost exclusively with herself. Like Goddard, he sees her
motivated by a desire to perform some heroic service to the uncle "because of a foolish romantic
attachment" (68).

It is here that the unity of Ward's interpretation seems to break down. For the governess, as Ward
describes her, seems to be not merely imperfect but the very essence of Jamesian evil as Ward has
defined it. It would seem logical for Ward to suggest that the ghosts are her hallucinations, as
Goddard does, or that they represent cosmic evil which materializes through the mediumistic
powers of this self-deceived but evil woman, as Lydenberg does. The governess, with her
unreflective and self-serving smothering of the children, is far too exact a representation of
Jamesian evil as Ward has defined it to be merely an ineffective fighter against an evil whose
primary manifestation is elsewhere.

This, however, is Ward's view. He criticizes the governess for initially romanticizing Bly as "an
imagined garden of Bliss" instead of recognizing "the ugly real ghosts" (68). He faults her
"deficiencies" in failing to grasp sooner the corrupt assignations between the children and their
infernal mentors.

For the most part, the children completely deceive her. She realizes too late that their `angelic'
appearances conceal corrupted souls. Their various tricks and deceptions invariably succeed; little
Miles is especially charming so that Flora can meet Miss Jessel (69).

Ward's insights can be complemented by Lydenberg's interpretation in which the ghosts

materialize through the governess's mediumistic powers or West's reading in which the ghosts
possess the governess rather than the children. The ghosts could also be seen as mysterious founts
of evil emanating from the depths of the governess's subconscious. However, the unity of Ward's
interpretation is vitiated, it seems to me, if the ghosts are not, in some way interpreted as "her"
ghosts.

G. Krook

Dorothea Krook also considers the story's ambiguity to be an irreducible part of its structure.
Accordingly, she faults both Heilman and his polar counterparts-- Wilson and Goddard--for one-
sided readings of the story. In Krook's view, both the theological and psychoanalytic readings call
attention to essential elements in the story; consequently, both are invalid by reason of their
incompleteness. Krook offers insightful analyses of James's techniques for engendering this
insoluble ambiguity and then proceeds to suggest philosophical and theological themes which, in
her view, the ambiguity is intended to convey.

Krook faults the psychoanalytic interpretations of Wilson and Goddard for their incompatibility
with James's stated intention to write a story of two corrupted children, their failure fully to
account for contrary evidence such as Douglas's glowing recommendations in the prologue and the
"identification scene" in chapter five, and their tendency to ignore, de-emphasize, or explain away
central elements of the story--such as the history of the living Quint and Jessel and the
questionable behavior of the children (373-74). On the other hand, the apparitionist readings,
according to Krook, although they call attention to the real corruption of the children and rightly
see the governess as engaged in a battle to save them from evil beings, fail to do justice to "at least
three vital elements in the story": its all-pervasive ambiguity; ". . . our persistent impression that
the governess is, in some sense, guilty . . ."; and "the significance of the governess's being the first-
person narrator of the whole story" (375). In contrast to these incomplete readings, Krook offers an
approach which, she holds, is "genuinely inclusive" (107).

Krook insists that the story's ambiguity is deliberately engendered and ineradicable.

To recapitulate: what neither Goddard nor Wilson on their side nor Heilman on his appear to
recognize is that the text in fact--not possibly or probably but actually--yields two meanings, both
equally self-consistent and self-complete. This is what the term `ambiguous' )means( when applied
to )The Turn of the Screw( (and )The Sacred Fount( and )The Golden Bowl(): it means that on one
reading the children are--not )may( be but )are(--corrupt, the governess )is( their good angel, and
the apparitions are in some way real, while on the other reading the children )are( innocent, she )is(
a monster, and the apparitions are in some sense unreal or hallucinatory. In respect to the
ambiguity, therefore, the relevant critical question is not `Which is the "true" meaning?' but `Why
did James insist on making his text yield, with this ferocious consistency, both meanings, the
"innocent" and the "guilty"?' The answer to this question is not to choose one meaning to the
exclusion of the other--without, that is, taking the other fully into account--and declare the
preferred meaning (on whatever grounds, Freudian or Christian or commonsensical) to be the true
one. The critic here is not invited to choose or prefer; he is invited only to recognize the co-
existence of the two meanings as equally self-complete and self-consistent, and then to explain it--
to explain this very coexistence of the two meanings which defines the ambiguity (388-89).

Krook provides a detailed and insightful analysis of the narrative methods which effect this
ambiguity. She points out elements in the plot which, in Wilson's words, can be "read in either of
the two senses." For example, in his conversation with the governess on the way to church in
chapter fourteen, Miles says, "I want my own sort." This can mean either that he wants to be with
boys his own age or that he wants to communicate with his evil soul-mate, Quint. The governess's
statements about "losing" or "possessing" Miles can be interpreted as the anguished cries of either
a good angel or a selfish and possessive woman. Mrs. Grose's ready identification of the apparition
in chapter four might be due to suggestion but might also be a genuine recognition that the
governess has seen the ghost of Quint. The governess's continual expressions of doubt about her
sanity, similarly,

may be read either as proof of her actually being what in those moments she fears herself to be, or
as proof of precisely the opposite --that she is too sane and balanced )not( to feel she must be mad
to see what she is seeing (388).

Furthermore, and perhaps more interestingly, Krook suggests that evidences which seem
unambiguously to support one of the two positions--apparitionist or non-apparitionist--are
balanced by others which seem unambiguously to support the opposing position. James, therefore,
took care to balance the evidences for and against [each] hypothesis with the nicest precision. Thus
the several references to the governess's `wild' looks to which Goddard draws attention are
balanced by the empathetic testimony to her sanity in the prologue. . . (388).

This ambiguity is first intended to convey ` the mystery of iniquity' and `the mystery of
godliness' . . . the final inexplicability, both in its nature and origin, of absolute evil and good in the
human soul (131).

The novella is, therefore, a fable about the redemptive power of human love: the power of love--
here the governess's love for the children--to redeem the corrupt element in a human soul, and so
to ensure the final triumph of good over evil; though (as so often in tragedy) at the cost of the
mortal life of the redeemed soul (122).

The governess's love for the children, according to Krook, can be seen as genuinely self-
transcendent and hence not explainable in terms of neurosis or psychopathology. In defending the
governess, Krook stands so vehemently with Douglas in the prologue and against Wilson that one
wonders why she is so sensitive to criticism of frustrated spinsters:

An excessive preoccupation with sexual neurosis in general and an excessive (perhaps neurotic?)
antipathy to Anglo-Saxon spinsters in particular may subvert a man's powers of judgement in
disastrous ways. )Could( Mr. Wilson (one asks) have ignored, or mentally explained away, the
testimony to the governess's sanity, intelligence and moral probity set out in the prologue if he had
not come to the text with certain preconceived notions (and certain strong feelings) about the
psychological make-up of the Anglo-Saxon spinster? That the governess technically belongs to
this class of person may be true; but that James, whether consciously or unconsciously, presented
her as a member of this class, exhibiting the eternal, immutable characteristics that Mr. Wilson
ascribes to it, is patently false: we have only to recall Olive Chancellor in )The Bostonians( to
recognize, first, that when James wanted to present a type approximating to Mr. Wilson's thwarted
Anglo-Saxon spinster (with all its neurotic or quasi-neurotic symptoms) he was perfectly capable
of doing it, and, second, that there is no resemblance--none, at any rate, to an unbiased eye--
between this Anglo-Saxon spinster and that (379-80).

Interestingly, Krook admits that the governess's devotion to the children springs partly from an
erotic attachment to the employer. She insists, however, that this . . . argues nothing pathological in
the character of the governess. Her passion may be romantic but it is not therefore neurotic; and
since in his later works James came to see passion, whether `unrequited' or not, as the sacred fount
of the most notable, most heroic, most interesting moral endeavour, it is consistent with this view
that the governess in )The Turn of the Screw(--like May Server in )The Sacred Fount( and Maggie
Verver in )The Golden Bowl(--should have undertaken her heroic enterprise at Bly `for love, for
love, for love'--not only of the children but also of their charming uncle (127-28).

Similarly, the corruption in the children extends to unexplainable depths. Quint and Jessel
represent "Henry James's sense of the mystery and final inexplicability of absolute evil . . . the
sheer inexplicability of the nature and origin of evil in the human soul. . ." (129). However--even
though the lack of specificity indicates that the evil in the children is more than sexual--it is rooted
in sexuality, just as the governess's goodness is rooted in her erotic attraction to her employer.
Krook suggests that the children have been damaged by intimate exposure to the sexual affair
between Quint and Jessel:

They made the details fully accessible to the children, communicating them in the confidential,
insinuating, nudging-and-whispering way in which such people habitually talk about sexual
matters, especially to the young (112).

Krook suggests that these confidences amounted to covert molestation and that overt molestation
possibly accompanied them.

The existence of an erotic relation between the servants and the children themselves is strongly
hinted at: indeed, of erotic exchanges of some kind, between Quint and Miles in particular, which
if not actively homosexual at any rate expressed itself in `talk'-- intimate and sustained talk--about
these matters (112).
Such violations of boundaries between adults and children could educe the corrupt elements the
perspicacious governess perceives:

The effect of these confidences (as anyone who as a child has had any experience of them will
know) would be twofold: the children would find them, on the one hand, confusing and
frightening, and on the other, dangerously, unhealthily exciting and alluring (112).

Moreover, just as the governess's erotic attachment to the employer was able to lead to a goodness
transcending sexuality, so the "dangerously, unhealthily exciting and alluring" sexual interest
which the living servants awakened can lead the children to an abyss of evil far beyond sexual
misconduct, an abyss of evil represented by the mysterious, ghostly figures the once living
servants have become.

The final and most disastrous effect of the children's exposure to Quint and Miss Jessel would in
that case also be clear. It would be to induce in them, and in Miles in particular, a craving for more
and more `knowledge' of this kind--for the fascination, the excitement, the forbidden, in sexual
knowledge (and potentially, of course, also in sexual practice) with which Quint and Miss Jessel
had infected the children that would give them their hold over them. By this means they would
have succeeded in possessing themselves of the hearts and minds of the children, attaching them
inseparably to their own depraved persons; and it is this finally that would make it worth their
while, so to speak, to come back `for a second round of badness'--to `beckon' to them, `invite and
solicit' them (as James says in the )Notebooks() `so that the children may destroy themselves, lose
themselves, by responding, by getting into their power' (113-14).

James, however, according to Krook's interpretation, is dramatizing not only the mysteries of good
and evil but a deeper mystery still: "the co-existence or co-presence of good and evil in the human
soul" (130).

For the governess, in her goodness, falls prey to "spiritual pride . . . the last infirmity of the angels
of light themselves" (127). In the final scene, according to Krook, Miles is on the verge of
renouncing his allegiance to Quint. The governess, however, continues her interrogation, brutally
pressing for more details,

at a point when the child has been harrowed already to the furthest limit of his small moral
resources, when he has gone as far as he can in the way of confession and repentance (126).

Her excess finally drives Miles back to Quint and terrifies the child to death. The governess's
pride, which has led her to renounce all aid throughout the story, finally takes the form of an
insatiable spiritual possessiveness--

the desire to know all--to `get all' (in the governess's own phrase) in the sense of putting herself in
complete possession of the child's soul by a complete knowledge of all that he has done. This is the
aspiration after complete and perfect knowledge which by Christian definition belongs only to God
and not to man; and this, which in the traditional Faustus story is shown as the glorious and
damnable sin of Faustus himself, the soul that had sold itself to the devil, is here) transferred to
God's own emissary, the `good angel' of the Faustus story (125).

The story's ending influences retrospectively the reader's perception of the governess's earlier
actions.

And this lapse (we come now to see) is only the last and most disastrous expression of something
in the governess of which we have been uneasily conscious all the time: some flaw, some fatal
weakness, in her moral constitution that has, in some elusive way, been present throughout in all
her relations with the two children (125).

Just as the goodness of the governess coexists with Faustian pride, so the corruption of the children
coexists with innocence. The children are innocent because they "are not old enough to be morally
culpable" (110). But though they have not deliberately chosen wrong, they are corrupted by "a
knowingness . . . of `forbidden' things" (109) and "a craving for more and more `knowledge' of this
kind--for the fascination, the excitement, the stimulation, to the imagination and the senses, of a
debased eroticism" (113-14). James, according to Krook, has chosen the children's ages with this
mysterious co-presence in mind.

It is therefore probably no accident that the children in )The Turn of the Screw( should be the age
they are. Flora, we are told, is eight, Miles ten. . . . Were they (it can be argued) even a few years
younger, say, four and six, or five and seven, they would be too young to show the effects of their
corruption by the servants in a way interesting enough or instructive enough for the purposes of
James's fable; were they, on the other hand, a few years older--Flora twelve, for instance, and
Miles fourteen--they would indeed be old enough to be corrupted, but too old to be properly
innocent. James in his genius has, it would seem, `caught' his children at the right age--at the exact
age when this co-existence of the innocence with the corruption may be most distinctly perceived
and therefore most instructively exhibited (110-11).

The all-pervasive ambiguity of the story is intended to convey the "co-presence of good and evil in
the human soul" (130). The good governess is tainted with Faustian pride, and the children are
both corrupt and innocent. We have in this story, says Krook, two stories--a Faustian fable which
becomes something deeper than a straightforward version of itself.

The Turn of the Screw(, I have tried to show, is pre-eminently a Faustian fable of salvation in
which the governess plays the part of the good angel; and to that extent the governess is `good' and
`innocent' and the children `evil' and `guilty' (of the corruption from which she is seeking to save
them). But the governess is also guilty in the same sense indicated (though not in Mr. Wilson's
sense); and to this extent the children are the victims of the evil in her and are themselves innocent.
And this, precisely, is what the ambiguity is there to express--the mystery and inexplicability of
this very phenomenon, this co-presence of good and evil, innocence and guilt, in the children and
in the governess; and the final baffling, tormenting impossibility of determining the degree of
innocence in the guilt and of guilt in the innocence (130-31).

This "tormenting impossibility," Krook maintains, is "another aspect" of the story's ambiguity, an
aspect which "may properly be called metaphysical" (131). Each of us has the tendency, Krook
reminds us, "to `read out' of the situation what is really there and . . . instead to `read into' it some
part of the content of one's own mind" (132). This tendency renders problematic our moral choices
and, hence, our moral stature.

For it consists, at bottom, in a false or distorted view of reality, which is a metaphysical disaster,
and in not knowing what we know, which is an epistemological disaster and it is because it is, in
the first instance, metaphysical and epistemological that it is, derivatively, moral: the moral
infirmity (with all its consequences) is grounded in the metaphysical and epistemological
incapacity . . . the religious thinkers have always insisted that metaphysics is antecedent to
morality, that truth is the necessary condition of goodness, that knowledge is virtue, that no man
can be good--really, successfully good--whose vision of reality is false or distorted, and who
therefore does not know whether what he knows is fact or delusion (134).

Krook, like Shine, perceives in the work the theme of epistemological skepticism. The governess's
recognition of this fundamental "epistemological incapacity," suggests Krook, explains her doubts
about her own sanity and her own moral stature. She cannot "ever know for certain whether what
she thought she saw of the children's relations with the dead servants was or was not there to be
seen" (133). Here, of course, Krook is very close to Shine, who also sees the ambiguous situation
which confronts the governess at Bly as paradigmatic of ambiguities which confront all people.
However, while Shine sees in the governess an immature adolescent, Krook sees in her the fully
conscious mind--the kind of mind that belongs to all the late-Jamesian vessels of
consciousness . . . a mind whose receptiveness to experience and powers of discrimination and
analysis exceed by so much the capacities of the minds that surround it as to make it seem almost
of a different species; and given such a mind, it is not surprising (James intimates) that a
portentous question-mark should hang over all its operations and persistently threaten its peace
(133).

Her doubts about her sanity and moral stature express "a cruel paradox that the most highly
developed mind should, in the end, be incapable of knowing what it knows" (133).

Krook's approach is authorial, like that of so many other critics in this period. She interprets
elements by comparing and contrasting them with others in James's canon and by placing the
novella in the chronological sequence of James's works. She argues that the governess is not a
neurotic spinster by contrasting her with Olive Chancellor in The Bostonians (380). She highlights
the governess's moral failures by contrasting her with Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl (128).
She argues that the governess is a "victim of developed consciousness" by comparing her to
another protagonist of the same period--the weekend guest of The Sacred Fount (132-33).

Krook's approach is also philosophical. She seems to see the literary work as a series of messages
which the author is conveying and the critic's task as a deciphering of the meaning the author
intended to convey--as one might attempt to decode an obscure diplomatic communication or an
enigmatic letter from a friend by studying closely the text itself in conjunction with information
about the life, beliefs, personality, and writing methods of the author. Here, of course, we are
reminded of the phenomenological criticism typified by Edna Kenton. Krook, however, relies
solely on discursive reasoning--she does not attempt to intuitively "enter into" the mind of the
author as do Kenton and other phenomenological critics.

3. Psychoanalytic Criticism
A. Focusing on the Author

A number of important psychoanalytic and related readings were published during the period
under discussion. As we have previously noted, psychoanalytic criticism, with some overlappings,
can be divided into three types: that which focuses on the psychology of the author; that which
analyzes the psychology of fictional characters; and that which seeks to probe the responses of the
reader--whether a particular reader (such as the critic himself), a particular type of reader, or a
fictional reader imagined consciously or unconsciously by the author and encoded in the structure
of the text.

Katan
An excellent example of the first type of psychoanalytic criticism is "A Causerie on Henry James's
`The Turn of the Screw'" by M. Katan, M.D. Katan reads the story as a nightmare in which James
attempts to transfer his primal scene anxieties to the reader. His main focus is on the depth
psychology of James, as he attempts to show how James's particular history would lead him to
construct this particular nightmarish fantasy. In discussing the fantasy as a primal scene nightmare,
Katan offers telling insights into the depth psychology of the fictional characters. In relating the
experiences of these fictional characters to that of many real people, Katan offers a cogent
explanation of the story's powerful effects on so many readers.

Katan's starting point is the assertion that James intended to frighten his readers. To support this he
quotes at length the Preface to the New York Edition. Katan cannot, however, be justly accused of
succumbing to the intentional fallacy, for he is concerned with James's intentions as realized in the
work. Thus, he approvingly quotes "an analytic rule, not at all incorrect even today, that `the result
reveals the intention' . . ." (321). Katan then suggests James's probable motivation:

. . . James is doing here the sort of thing that children do. He wants to instill anxiety in everybody
because he has so much anxiety himself. He wants to get rid of his anxiety by discharging it onto
others. And he tries to achieve this by using infantile mechanisms (322).

At this point a less perspicacious psychiatrist might fall into the trap of equating art and neurosis.
Katan, however, is sophisticated enough to avoid this simplistic misidentification:

If infantile mechanisms are used in art, this does not mean that for that reason art is neurotic. We
may say of the neurotic that infantile conflicts disturb the normal functioning of his ego. In contra-
distinction, the ego of the artist uses infantile mechanisms for the purpose of a higher aim. Namely,
to create a product that we call art (322).

Thus, in the tradition of Goddard, Katan combines telling psychological insights with a profound
respect for literary values.

That the story is the re-creation of a nightmare Katan deduces from the prologue, reminding us that
the story is preceded by a guest's narrative of a child awakening to a terrifying nocturnal vision;
that the nightmare is James's, Katan infers by a highly original, if perhaps questionable, mixing of
historical and fictional time:

Douglas, the narrator, during the summer after his second year at Trinity, fell in love with the then
governess, who was ten years his senior. The supernatural events, the written account of which she
sent him, took place when she was twenty. We may assume that Douglas, when he went home that
summer for his vacation, was then the same age. Thus, the apparitions must have appeared ten
years before he met her. Since Douglas kept quiet about the affair for forty years more, we may
place the original events fifty years back. )The Turn of the Screw( was published in 1898, when
James was fifty-five years old. It was written, of course, somewhat earlier. If we may trust our
deductions, the traumatic events in James' life which caused his nightmares took place when he
was about five years old (322).

These "traumatic events," according to Katan, included "primal scene observations" which the
young James shared with "another child" (334)--hence the nightmare in the mother's bedroom
which Douglas's guest narrates and the implied collusion between Miles and Flora. Since the story
ends "without a solution" (322) (Miles is dead at the end, and Flora is seriously ill), Katan divines
the following psychoanalytic moral:
. . . if, as a child, you have witnessed intercourse between the parents or their substitutes, and if
you cannot get rid of these impressions but under their influence you get `in cahoots' with another
child, you are lost (325).

James himself was "lost," Katan suggests, not only because of his sharing the secret with another
child, but also because of his mother's unhealthy response to the situation, a response which is
reflected in the governess's manner of relating to the children. In the story the governess becomes
sexually excited because of her attraction to Miles and her own incestuous desires for Quint, the
sexualized counterpart of the asexual bachelor who represents her father. Her sexual excitement
puts Miles in an impossible situation, the only escape from which is death.

Through the interference by the governess, the boy has been saved from the ghost, but now he is
exposed to an even greater danger. It is obvious, after the description of the intense incestuous
feelings between the governess and the boy, that exposure to the influence of this woman would
arouse him too strongly sexually . . . the boy had a homosexual dependency upon Peter Quint. This
power of Peter Quint's extends even after the valet's death. Yet this relation with Peter Quint
protects him against the dangerous attachment to a mother figure. When the governess destroys
Peter Quint's influence, she turns the clock back. The warded off exciting oedipal relationship
comes again to the fore. Out of necessity the boy has to die, for James had no other solution left. It
was this dramatic ending through which James hoped to prevent the reader from having any
discharge of the castration anxiety that James intended to arouse (333).

Similarly, Katan suggests, Henry's mother, not through supernatural events but in one way or
another having become suspicious of some kind of exciting interplay between the children, must
have tried to force the truth out of them. James spares no trouble to make it clear how excited his
mother became during this quest of hers. . . . Her methods exposed him to the danger of
overstimulation and, as a result, losing control of himself (335).

The effects of this maternal misbehavior may have been exaggerated, according to Katan, by
James's emotionally absent father, who is reflected in the physically absent and indifferent uncle.

Katan finds in the ineffectiveness of the governess important lessons not only for parents but for
psychotherapists as well. Indeed, the governess can be seen as the model of one kind of
incompetent psychotherapist.

For, in general, if the therapist, in his efforts to free the patient from certain thoughts, becomes too
excited himself, then therapy becomes impossible. Interpretation cannot work under such
circumstances. The patient is then in danger of also becoming too excited. He can no longer rely
on the therapist for help in mastering his excitement. As a result, he either runs away or turns
directly against the therapist (332).

Although James's sexual problems were never satisfactorily resolved, according to Katan, he did
attempt various solutions. Flora, Miles, the governess, and the absent guardian represent four of
these attempted solutions or four successive stages in James's ego development. Each of these
stages represents, in chronological sequence, a different ego attempt to master the conflict which is
at the center of the story (336).

Flora, for example, represents one aspect of James's childhood personality.

Her angelic appearance concealed a `wild life' of forbidden thoughts and actions . . . we may
construe that young Henry's experiences made him afraid to assume the masculine role and
therefore he wanted to be a girl (336).

Miles, on the other hand, represents the child's "masculine protest," the boy who "wants to
associate with men and to shake off the influence of being dominated by women" (336). The
governess represents James's mother, with whom at one point he identified. "James, in his mother
identification, loved a little boy who was the picture of himself at an early age" (337). James,
however, "forbade the appearance of overt homosexual features in his life"--hence, "the sexual side
of the identification is abolished and can appear only in the form of Miss Jessel's ghost" (337).
Thus, James finally became the figure represented by the bachelor uncle.

Nothing else remained for him, therefore, but to become a man who looked at life from a distance,
a man who could create from his unconscious only those figures which he could never realize in
actuality. He became the bachelor (337).

Katan's article is an outstanding example of psychoanalytic criticism. He explains the story as a

primal scene nightmare which "changes . . . into an event of supernatural character" (323) and
affects the reader by arousing primal scene anxieties which, at the end of the story, are not
discharged. This reading offers profound insights into the psychodynamics of the fictional
characters. In a manner reminiscent of Wilson's 1938 essay, Katan sees the sexual relationship
between the ghosts as a projection of the governess's desired sexual relationship with the employer.
He relates this to her unresolved oedipal feelings in a more detailed way than Wilson had done. He
also analyzes the children and the master more convincingly than most critics who have analyzed
the governess. The children's obsession with Quint and Jessel, Katan suggests, combines with the
governess's fantasies about the master to form a shared delusion--"une hallucination a trois" (324),
which sexually excites all three. The master is driven from Bly, according to Katan, because the
children's excitement threatens to revive his own primal scene memories--"he runs away from the
obscure stirrings of the oedipal feelings which have so strongly aroused the other three" (330).
Katan suggests that Mrs. Grose, while she understands what the children have witnessed, does not
see the ghosts--i.e., does not share the hallucinations--because she is "only a motherly figure, who
does not harbor any incestuous fantasies. . . . Her defenses do not need hallucinations to fall back
upon" (332).

Katan's psychoanalysis of the author is, in all essential points, in agreement with analyses made by
other students of James, such as Wilson, Leavis, Edel, and Sharp. His discussion of Flora, Miles,
the governess, and the employer as representatives of four stages of James's psychosexual
development is a new and profoundly insightful contribution.

Finally, Katan does not lose sight of literary values. His analyses of James and his fictional
creations all move toward an explanation of the story's effect on readers--namely, the arousal of
primal scene anxieties which are not discharged. Katan explicitly denies the identification of art
and neurosis. His discussion of that problem is, of course, not complete, but a complete discussion
would require a separate essay.

2. Aldrich

The great merits of Katan's essay are highlighted when the essay is compared to a psychoanalytic
reading of less profundity and scope, such as "Another Twist to The Turn of the Screw" by C.
Knight Aldrich, M.D.

Aldrich's purpose is to defend non-apparitionist readings from the most commonly cited
objections, succinctly summarized by Alexander E. Jones: "there is no other way to satisfactorily
explain the governess' knowledge of Quint's appearance, Flora's shocking language, or Miles' final
surrender of the name" (qtd. in Aldrich 367). Aldrich suggests that these objections may be
overcome "if the customary assumption about the character of Mrs. Grose is questioned" (368).
Aldrich suggests that the older woman is not a naive and benevolent ally of the governess, but
rather a bitter enemy, possessive toward the children and jealous of the governess's authority over
them and affectionate interaction with them. She, therefore, manufactures the "infamy" of Quint
and Jessel and "tailors her description of Quint to fit the governess's description of her
hallucination"; she also "covers her tracks by discouraging any attempts of the governess to
confirm her picture of Quint" (370-71). Flora's obscene language is also a fabrication. Miles's
identification of Quint results from information given him by Mrs. Grose.

Upon first consideration, this would seem to be a psychoanalytic study focusing primarily on the
fictional characters rather than the author. The above observations, however, are not Freudian per
se--they are observations about the plot which any New Critic might make. Aldrich offers a
"diagnosis" of the governess which appears to be both incomplete and unconvincing:

A crucial factor in paranoid psychopathology as outlined by Freud in the Schreber case is the
projection onto others of a homosexuality unacceptable to the patient. Through insight or, perhaps,
through observation, James has caught the thread of the paranoid psycho-pathology, as the
governess, aided by Mrs. Grose, weaves the fabric of her delusional system around the presumed
homosexual relationships of the departed servants and the children (375).

This explanation ignores the governess's infatuation for the employer, her obsession with the
preconceived heterosexual relationship between Quint and Jessel, and the fact that her erotic
feelings seem directed toward Miles rather than Flora.

Instead, Aldrich's most interesting suggestions concern the psychodynamics of the author. Aldrich
suggests that Mrs. Grose may have represented [James's] mother, in reality a destructive woman,
but a woman of whom James was so afraid that he had to repress his perceptions of her evil
characteristics and consciously could see her only as good.

This inability consciously to perceive the truth may explain why her villainy is so well hidden that
so many readers have missed it. Possibly, Aldrich suggests, "James himself was deceived . . . his
unconscious, not his conscious mind, determined the real character of Mrs. Grose" (373).
Interestingly, Aldrich agrees with Katan that James's relationship with his mother was unhealthy,
but disagrees with Katan as to which fictional character represents James's mother. It is also
interesting to note that Aldrich agrees with Wilson that James was deceived but disagrees as to
what character deceived him. These partial disagreements ought to remind us of the complexities
of psychoanalytic judgments and warn us of the dangers of facile psychoanalytic interpretations.

Aldrich's essay is also interesting for its serious suggestion of the villainy of Mrs. Grose--a
suggestion which Solomon had made tongue-in-cheek. Unlike Katan, however, he does not offer
profound analyses of the other characters. His speculations about James's mother are in agreement
with those of a host of critics and biographers of James, such as Edel, Wilson, Sharp, Knights, and
Leavis; Aldrich does not, however, analyze the author's persona as thoroughly as Katan--consider,
for example, Katan's analysis of the various fictional characters as stages of James's ego
development. Finally, Aldrich does not offer any profound insights concerning the story's effect on
the reader. He suggests only that readers have been fooled about the character of Mrs. Grose
because the author has declined to "include . . . tangible evidence of her villainy" (373).
3. Thomson

"The Turn of the Screw: Some points on the Hallucination Theory" by A. W. Thomson, is another
essay which appears, upon initial consideration, to be focused on the fictional characters but
which, upon closer reflection, can better be classified as focusing on the author. The structure of
Thomson's argument is remarkably similar to the structure of Aldrich's. Thomson, like Aldrich,
sets out to defend the hallucination theory from powerful objections by offering a new theory
about the author.

As Aldrich sought to reply to the objections of Alexander E. Jones, so Thomson seeks to reply to
the objections of Dorothea Krook. Both Aldrich and Thomson explain the apparent anomalies by
postulating certain mental processes in the author. However, while Aldrich suggested unconscious
processes, Thomson suggests deliberate and conscious choices on the part of James. Since
Thomson is concerned with the author's conscious choices rather than with his underlying
psychodynamics, some readers might question our inclusion of Thomson among the
psychoanalytic critics. Thomson's concern, however, is to explain the co-existence in the story of
"the depiction of the growth of the governess's neurosis" (28) and the elements which seem to
disconfirm non-apparitionist readings. In the course of developing this explanation, Thomson
offers some profound insights into the psychodynamics of the governess, although his main focus
is James's conscious intentions.

Thomson considers the arguments for the non-apparitionist position to be overwhelming. He finds
in Wilson's interpretation of the Preface "a very strong suggestion" (28) for a position which is
confirmed by a close reading of the story. In his close reading of the story, Thomson accepts
Wilson's 1938 suggestion that Quint and Jessel represent sexually active counterparts to the
employer and the governess. Thomson then adds several points of his own. "We may also note," he
says, "that the difference in the manner of the appearance of the ghosts strongly suggests that their
origin is in the governess herself." Thomson points out an important difference between the two
ghosts. Jessel does not at first appear directly: as she says, the knowledge of it `gathers in her'
strangely, and the phrase is revealing, since what it suggests is quite different from the sudden and
unmistakable `full vision' of Quint. Miss Jessel first appears, in fact, like the growth of an idea,
whereas Quint `was there or not there: not there if I didn't see him'. The difference indicates that, if
Quint was the product of a repression of which she was unaware, and which declared itself with
some violence, that of Miss Jessel is, in part, the result of something quite conscious: the desire for
confirmation of her first fears, in order to save her reason. The apparition of Quint represents
something which is deep in her nature, that of Miss Jessel something of considerably less urgency.
And it is to be observed that when Miss Jessel appears in the schoolroom, the governess gets rid of
her by an act of will (31).

Thomson also points out that Quint's only entry into the house interrupts the governess's reading of
Amelia, a book often censored because of its frank treatment of sexuality. In addition, Thomson,
like Feinstein (to be discussed later in this chapter), points out that Quint almost always is visible
only from the waist up. That this peculiarity represents sexual repression is suggested even more
strongly, according to Thomson, when we consider James's story "Rose-Agathe": "In this story, as
Wilson says, `a man falls in love with a dummy in a Parisian hair-dresser's window and finally
buys her and takes her home to live with. The wax dummy is cut off at the waist'" (33). This citing
of other Jamesian works as evidence is consistent with Thomson's critical method, an attempt to
divine the author's intentions.

Like so many other proponents of non-apparitionist readings, Thomson cites as evidence the faulty
inductive reasoning of the governess, although he does not analyze her inductions with anything
like the detail of, say, Costello. Thomson directs our attention to "the recurrence throughout the
governess's narrative of the metaphor of filling in a picture, and the consequent suggestion of
fitting evidence into a different context," which parallels the progression of her psychoneurosis.

The confirmation in her of the habit is implied by such a remark as `by the time the morrow's sun
was high I had restlessly read into the facts before us all the meaning they were to receive from
subsequent and more cruel occurrences', which indicates the process so strongly that I think it is
probable that James is leaving the way open to a proper understanding of her crisis (30).

Thomson also, like many other critics--Wilson, Lydenberg, Katan, West, and Rubin come
immediately to mind--is impressed by the similarities between the employer and Miles and by the
governess's apparent erotic interest in Miles, as revealed, for example, in the bedroom scene in
chapter seventeen and her suggestion in chapter twelve that she and Miles resembled "a young
couple . . . on their wedding-journey." He also--like Collins, Rubin, Trachtenberg, and Holloway--
is impressed by the striking similarities between Miles and Douglas. Combining these two sets of
insights, Thomson suggests that the governess, because of her "resentment" of the employer's
indifference, "transferred" her infatuation to Miles and then, years later, to Douglas. He suggests
also that her revelations to Douglas possess something of the appearance of an act of expiation. For
those who believe (as Wilson at one point seems ready to do) that the governess herself understood
what had happened, this might be additional evidence. And it is consistent with that chill
suspicion, which at one moment touches her, of his innocence, and her own guilt (34).

These carefully constructed suggestions of psychopathology lead Thomson to reject Wilson's

theory that James unconsciously turned a ghost-story into a psychological study . . . to suggest that
James was deceiving himself is to presume too far. That he did not at any stage realize what had
been or what was being produced is (to say the least of it) unlikely, and it is as unlikely that he
would not knowingly have developed the story in accordance with it (29).

Nevertheless, Thomson finds two apparitionist arguments which Krook cites to be particularly
compelling: the "identification scene" in chapter five and remarks in James's notebooks and letters
and the Preface to the New York Edition which seem to suggest that the story is about supernatural
occurrences.

Thomson explains these anomalies by postulating not an unconscious but a conscious and
deliberate change of intention on the part of James as the construction of the work proceeded. The
passages in notebooks, letters, and the Preface Thomson considers "inadmissible" because they
concern James's original intentions. . . . There is nothing in either the Preface or the Notebooks
which will confirm what James's final intentions were, and Dr. Krook's reliance on them is ill-
advised (27-8).

This change of intention also explains the probably incontrovertible fact of the identification of
Quint. James may have allowed this to stand over from an earlier idea of a ghost story . . . it is
possible . . . that it is the product of a new idea which could not be fully reconciled with the
original idea, and that James, preoccupied with ambivalence, and recognizing that the dividing line
between ghosts and hallucinations is slight enough, left it at that (29).

Thomson's essay is reminiscent of Kenton's phenomenological criticism in that both essays attempt
to divine a message the author intended to express. Thomson, however, relies on rigorous,
objective analysis of the text rather than on attempts to collaborate intuitively with the author. In
the course of this objective analysis he has shed profound light on the psychology of the governess,
thus demonstrating the impracticability of dividing psychoanalytic criticism into rigidly exclusive
types; this essay about the author's intentions says much of value concerning the protagonist's
psychology.

B- Psychoanalytic and Related Criticism Focusing on the Governess and/or

Other Fictional Characters
1. Cranfill and Clark

An Anatomy of The Turn of the Screw by Thomas Mabry Cranfill and Robert Lanier Clark, Jr. is a
book length study which focuses on the psychopathology of the governess. Psychoanalytic
criticism focusing on fictional characters may be divided into source studies tracing the influence
of specific psychological writings on the narrative artist's work and readings which assume the
author unconsciously apprehended deep truths of human psychology and caused them to be
reflected in his work. Few if any psychoanalytic readings, however, can be fitted exclusively into
either category. Cranfill and Clark specify their intention to combine the two approaches. After
approvingly quoting Freud's statement that artists "have a way of knowing many of the things
between heaven and earth which are not dreamed of in our philosophy," they praise Edel for
"wisely [insisting] on making allowances for James's familiarity with the psychological knowledge
of his time" and Cargill for his "impressive, illuminating, all but conclusive" argument that "The
Case of Miss Lucy R." is a source for The Turn of the Screw. They then argue that Edmund
Parish's Hallucinations and Illusions, published in 1897, "deserves reviewing as possibly a second
source" (35-36).Cranfill and Clark agree with Goddard that the motive for the governess's
hallucinations is a desire to perform some self-sacrificial feat for the employer toward whom she is
infatuated. Like Goddard, they survey the text in New Critical fashion and find extensive evidence
of her psychopathology and destructive effects on others, particularly Miles and Flora, as well as
non-technical insights into her psychology. For example, they suggest that her emotional,
intellectual, and material deprivation in her father's parsonage has predisposed her to
"incomparable curiosity" (86) concerning sexual matters and "lust for martyrdom" (90) in the face
of sexual repression. They suggest also that her predilection for seeing evil in other people is
largely the result of the biases of her Calvinist upbringing. Like many other critics, Cranfill and
Clark cite numerous instances when the governess doubts her own sanity, engages in obviously
faulty inductive reasoning, and harasses the children.

Many of the observations Cranfill and Clark make have been made by other critics. They do,
however, suggest several new and interesting possibilities. They suggest that the children and Mrs.
Grose engage in a variety of "nursing techniques" (161) to bring the governess out of her "hideous
introspection" (150)--for example, "urging her on to autobiographical recitations," suggesting that
the uncle might unexpectedly come to Bly, and entertaining her with music and pantomime
performances. They discuss at length the "less than perfect" lighting at the time of some of the
visions and her frequently abnormal behavior during and after--for example, not reporting the first
vision of Quint on the tower and going outside to meet Quint at the time of the second vision. They
point out that some of the accompaniments of her visions--time disruptions, abnormal hushes,
sensations of coldness--occur at other times when she only feels that the ghosts are present and in
secret communication with the children. They suggest that Miles was out on the lawn after
midnight in order to direct the governess's attention to himself and thus take some of the pressure
off his sister. They suggest that Miles was not accepted for another term at school because of his
extreme youth and that the letter to the guardian disappeared from the table in chapter twenty-one
because the governess recovered it herself. Perhaps most interestingly, they detail the influences of
the "English caste system" on the perceptions and interactions of the characters. They argue that
Mrs. Grose was jealous of Quint's friendliness with Jessel and the children because the
housekeeper considered Quint to be on the same social level as herself; consequently, he was
"much too free" socially--not necessarily sexually--and this disregard of caste distinctions caused
the housekeeper to give both servants a bad report. They also suggest that the governess and the
housekeeper frequently misunderstand one another because of the latter's vocabulary deficiencies--
she agrees that Miles "prevaricated," for example, without understanding what she is agreeing to.
Although Cranfill and Clark do not integrate socio-economic realities into their psychoanalytic
interpretation as thoroughly as do critics such as Spilka and Cole, it is significant that they include
insights which Marxists emphasize.

Cranfill and Clark's discussion of the differences between the 1898 text and the version published
in the New York Edition is one of the weaker elements in a generally outstanding study. They
claim, citing a number of examples, that the revised version is a great improvement over the
original and that Edel was correct in his assertion "that the changes betrayed James's determination
`to alter the nature of the governess' testimony from that of a report of things observed, perceived,
recalled, to things felt'" (18). Elizabeth A. Sheppard, in one of the appendices to her book, has, I
think, convincingly shown that the revised version is not a clear improvement and that the pattern
discerned by Edel and Cranfill and Clark is the result of selective examination of the evidence.
Cranfill and Clark produce some impressive looking examples of a movement toward greater
subjectivity in the second version, but Sheppard collated the two texts in their entirety and found
numerous counter-examples. Sheppard concluded, correctly in my opinion, that no overall change
in meaning was intended by the revisions.

Cranfill and Clark's argument for considering Edmund Parish's work to be a source of The Turn of
the Screw is reminiscent of Cargill's argument for considering "The Case of Miss Lucy R." to be a
source. Like Cargill, they consider such sources to have influenced James in conjunction with the
influence of his sister's illness. They argue that James had ample opportunity to find out about and
read Parish's work because of his "familiarity with the psychological knowledge of his time, with
Charcot's work, and with his brother William's investigations" (35). Finally, they point out that the
psychiatric work appeared shortly before the novella was written.

According to Cranfill and Clark, Parish "discusses the conditions, causes, and victims of
hallucinations in terms that startlingly recall certain conditions, causes, actions, and mental
processes at Bly" (36). For example,

Parish's investigation of the causes of hallucinations . . . lists (1) morbid emotional states, (2) a
state of mental or physical exhaustion, (3) vivid expectation, and (4) the hypnogenic tendency of
prolonged reading (37).

Through numerous examples from the text, Cranfill and Clark demonstrate that the governess's
experience at Bly fits the foregoing pattern. Her "morbid emotional states" are obvious almost
from the beginning of the narrative and continue to the end--for instance, her unrequited passion
for the uncle, her Calvinist predilection for suspecting sin in even the most innocent actions, and
her continual mood changes which begin on the first page of her narrative. We can infer her "state
of mental or physical exhaustion" from her record of sleepless nights, beginning with her first
night at Bly. We see some kind of "vivid expectation" before each vision. For example, at the time
of the first vision of Quint, the governess is daydreaming about unexpectedly encountering the
employer; when she sees Jessel for the first time, she "knows" that some stranger is on the other
side of the lake before raising her eyes from her knitting. She encounters Quint in the house in the
dead of night while wandering through the hall expecting to see a ghost. The last two encounters
are also examples of how "the hypnogenic tendency of prolonged reading" can facilitate
hallucinations. In the former case, the governess is knitting (recall also that she had been repairing
a pair of gloves shortly before the second appearance of Quint); in the latter case, she has been up
till almost dawn reading Fielding's Amelia. "The eeriness of this recital," say Cranfill and Clark, is
enough to make girls--even sound sleepers and the thoroughly well adjusted--swear off excessive
stitching, mending, embroidering, knitting, crocheting, tatting, and quilting forever, in the fear that
these might propel one into the gehenna where evil spirits stalk, where even without looking one
may take them in with certitude (41).

Cranfill and Clark are careful not to turn this literary work into a mere psychiatric case history.
They assert categorically that "we should persist in regarding The Turn of the Screw as primarily a
work of art" (35). This concern with literary values is reflected in two ways.

First, Cranfill and Clark's overriding concern is with the artistic experience of the reader. They
defend their non-apparitionist interpretation on these grounds.

In our opinion James's masterpiece is a richer, more subtle, and more horrifying tale according to
the non-apparitionist reading than it is from the apparitionist point of view. We agree with the late
Wolcott Gibbs, who found the non-apparitionist reading `more terrible than any supernatural
hypothesis and also a good deal more shocking, maniacs being, to my taste, more disturbing than
ghosts' (35).

They also argue that the non-apparitionist interpretation adds poignancy to the story, as "the
children suffer prolonged, helpless, lethally dangerous exposure to the mad governess" (169).

Secondly, from the governess's "shocking experience" (46) of psychopathology, Cranfill and Clark
derive a theme of universal import concerning the nature of love. Not supernatural entities but her
foolish infatuation for the uncle is "all that has been tormenting her, and through her, the others at
Bly" (48). They find in her sufferings and the human destruction she causes "another warning
against the perils of loving not wisely but too well. . . . She is suffering the retribution that lies in
wait for all who love baselessly and excessively. . ." (46).

Cranfill and Clark's book length study is an outstanding example of psychoanalytic criticism,
noteworthy for its profound analysis of the psychology of a fictional character in the light of
literary values and its convincing delineation of another "public source" for The Turn of the Screw.

2. Paul N. Siegel

Paul N. Siegel, in a detailed analysis of the text, has demonstrated how "in each of the four
appearances of the apparitional Miss Jessel, she faithfully and unfailingly mirrors the actions of the
governess." Although he does not specifically mention Wilson, Siegel's main thesis--"that Miss
Jessel is a projection of the governess herself, a shadowy portion of her personality which she does
not wish to recognize" (30), appears identical to Wilson's 1938 Jungian reading in which the sexual
relationship between Quint and Jessel mirrors the desired relationship between the governess and
the employer.

Siegel points out that, throughout the first encounter at the lake, the governess has been staring at
Flora, which she accuses Miss Jessel of doing. In relating these events to Mrs. Grose, she admits
that her "own eyes" resembled the "awful eyes" of the spectral visitant. The paleness of the ghost is
similar to the facial pallor which shocked Mrs. Grose when she saw the governess looking in the
window following the second vision of Quint. The ensuing conversation highlights further
similarities such as their youth and beauty.

A similar pattern appears in Miss Jessel's final appearance by the lake. Despite Mrs. Grose's
protests, the governess has run outside hatless--like Quint and Jessel. When the governess points
toward Miss Jessel, Flora instead stares at Miss Jessel's successor, and "the `expression of hard,
still gravity' on Flora's face . . . mirrors the governess's hard, accusing look" (36). When Miss
Jessel stands exactly where the governess has recently stood, we are reminded of her appearance in
the schoolroom at the governess's desk and of the governess inadvertently sitting down on the
same step where "the most horrible of women" had previously sat.

Similarly, Siegel points out how the apparition in the schoolroom seems to emanate from the
governess's unconscious at an opportune moment to rescue her from her conscious decision to
leave Bly. In a manner reminiscent of Wilson, Siegel points out how the relationship of the former
servants can be seen as a reversal of the governess's social and economic inferiority to the man she
loves. "Miss Jessel becomes the great lady of her dreams; indeed, in relation to a valet, a governess
is a lady, as she is not to the master of the house." Leaving Bly, however, will shatter this fantasy,
and her unconscious warns her of this by presenting her with an image of a defeated Miss Jessel.

But now Miss Jessel appears dishonored, as she will be dishonored when the master, recalled, will
be convinced that she has been faithless to her trust. The dream of herself as the mistress of the
house will be shattered, and Miss Jessel, the phantom lady of her fantasy, will be dispossessed.
That image of desolation, vanishing with the governess's wild cry, leaves her with the `sense that I
must stay' (35).

Although Siegel's detailed analyses of these apparitions provide important insights into the
governess's psychology, he does not turn the novella into a psychiatric case history. He does not
even categorically assert that the ghosts are hallucinations. He maintains that his evidence
constitutes "irrefutable proof" only "that the hallucinationist reading of The Turn of the Screw is
no critical aberration or irresponsible fancy," but rather "a reading which the text itself is contrived
to suggest." He immediately adds that his interpretation is not "the only reading which it is
contrived to suggest: the apparitionist reading is as valid as the hallucinationist reading." His main
purpose, accordingly, is not to support the non-apparitionist case per se, but rather to argue "that
The Turn of the Screw is purposefully ambiguous on this matter and that this ambiguity is an
essential part of its effect" (30).

The story's ambiguity, says Siegel, is "the ultimate terror of its evil. Which is shadow, which
reality? This is the motif that runs through the tale" (31). Thus, Siegel's concern with literary
values is preeminent. His purpose is not the psychoanalysis of a character for its own sake, but
rather the high-lighting of the story's ambiguity in order to explain its effect of "ultimate terror" on
so many readers.

3. Bontly

Thomas J. Bontly also concentrates on the psychology of the fictional governess and, like Siegel,
sees the ghosts as reflections or externalizations of her own unhealthy drives. Bontly is in striking
agreement with Spilka (to be discussed shortly) on two counts: first, Bontly contends that the
governess is "neither mad nor abnormal, but quite tragically typical" (721) in her self-deluded and
destructive responses to her own sexuality and the children in her care (here Bontly parts company
with critics such as Cranfill and Clark); secondly, when he categorizes the novella as "a ghost story
in which the fantasy of one level of meaning ironically reveals the moral and psychological reality
of another level of meaning" (724), Bontly unites himself with critics such as Spilka and Firebaugh
who see the ghosts as real in the world of the story and consider the reader enjoined to accept them
as the price of entering that world and disassociates himself from critics such as Wilson and
Cranfill and Clark who see the ghosts as illusions. Like Lydenberg, Spilka, and Firebaugh--among
others--Bontly sees the governess's psychopathology not in the fact that the governess sees the
ghosts, but rather in the ways in which she chooses to react to them. Indeed, Bontly goes so far as
to assert that the insane woman's main delusion concerns not the reality of the ghosts but rather the
moral stature of the children:

. . . the particular madness which begins to afflict the governess seems not that of imagining ghosts
which do not exist, but rather the more common madness of imagining sophisticated depths in the
children which the resources of eight and ten year olds render highly unlikely (726).

Bontly differs from Spilka (and thus is discussed in a different part of this chapter) by being less
sociological than Spilka in his analysis of the young woman's psychology. Spilka explains her
problems in terms of the specific economic and social realities of Victorian Britain; Bontly, on the
other hand, sees in her unhappy predicament illustrations of universal realities concerning
sexuality, the family, and the process of socialization--in his words, "thus proving that the ghosts
which haunt the governess, and which finally come to haunt the children, are the ghosts which--to
some extent, at least--must haunt us all" (735).

Bontly criticizes both apparitionists and non-apparitionists for having "exceeded the boundaries of
legitimate textual evidence in developing their theories"; this is proven, he suggests, by "their
refutations of one another," which "seem too well established to need recapitulation" (722). He
also argues that both positions do insufficient justice to the complexity of the Jamesian vision of
evil as this vision is reflected in the novels of the "major phase." Bontly contends, on the one hand,
that the non-apparitionist interpretations deny the reality of moral evil.

For if the governess is mad and the ghosts hallucinatory, we then have a world in which evil is an
illusion, an irrelevant value judgment, the externalization of inner psychological forces which are,
in themselves, neither good nor evil but empirical facts. )The Turn of the Screw( becomes then, in
this reading, a pathological case study by an objective and morally neutral analyst of human
aberrations (722).

This seems to me to be a gross oversimplification. Interpretations such as those of Goddard and

Cranfill and Clark seem convincingly to illustrate the widely accepted view that moral and
psychological aberrations can coexist and that the former type--excessive sexual love, for example,
or spiritual pride--can contribute to the development of the latter type. Bontly also derides the
apparitionists for . . . having imposed upon the tale either a Manichean fatalism, in which evil
operates as a positive, dominant force in human affairs and in the universe, or a Puritan asceticism,
in which evil is somehow the correlative of human flesh.

These misapprehensions, he contends, result from reading "the tale as a moral and religious
allegory in which evil is given the force of actuality in actual ghosts, and is explicitly associated
with human sexuality" (722).

In Bontly's view, on the other hand, Jamesian evil is not a positive force dualistically opposed to
the powers of good . . . . evil appears in this tale as a negative principle (in this sense quite
appropriately symbolized by the incorporeal figure of the ghost), an absence of good, a failure of
human love and understanding. Evil is . . . an inevitable byproduct of the human condition, limited
and temporal for all its tragic consequences (733).

We are also wrong, Bontly suggests, to see "evil . . . intrinsically tied, in this story, to the flesh and
human sexuality. That is the governess's aberration, not James's" (733). The governess becomes
evil, according to Bontly, not because she is a sexual being, but rather because her hopelessly
isolated situation leaves her natural needs unfulfilled:

We should recall that a basic element of the human family is missing at Bly, and it is this absence
of masculine authority and strength which accentuates the governess's weaknesses and makes it
possible for the ghosts to haunt her and to distort her relationship with the children. )The Turn of
the Screw( may be seen as both a social commentary and as a statement on the requirements of the
human soul, for it is precisely the incompleteness of the sexual basis of the family which is the
ultimate cause of the tragedy. The ghosts are there because the conjugal love of a mother and
father--strong, natural, life-giving--is not, and the irresponsibility of the children's uncle may thus
stand as symbolic of a far-reaching disorientation of the family and its abandonment of the basic
needs it was formed to serve (733-34).

Thus, Jamesian evil, says Bontly, is real--its origins, however, are not sexuality per se or evil
forces existing independently of the human condition, but rather "fear and guilt" resulting from
"failures in the individual's social and personal life--failures which, like original sin, are self-
perpetuating as they pass from generation to generation" (734).

In associating these "failures in the individual's social and personal life" with the "absence of
authority and strength," Bontly (like Feinstein, to be discussed shortly) seems to be offering what
may be termed a "masculinist" interpretation of the story. Most interestingly, in this age of
feminism with its frequent overvaluing of femininity and derogation of masculine vales, Bontly
and Feinstein unapologetically assert the importance of the male principle and the insufficiency of
a totally feminine world, such as the one dominated by the governess and Mrs. Grose.

The evil according to Bontly, adheres not in the ghosts themselves, but rather in the way the
governess reacts to them. Bontly's discussion of the ghosts is reminiscent of Roellinger's--both
critics emphasize the fact that the ghosts never say anything and do very little. Bontly, like Rees
(to be discussed shortly), emphasizes how little we know about the moral stature of the ghosts and
about their relationship to the children:

The range of possibilities as to the relationship of the ghosts and the children is in fact very wide.
They may not be aware of the ghosts at all--at least, not at first. Or they may be, as the governess
believes, wickedly in league with them from the start. Or, as an alternative which strangely never
occurs to the governess, they may be aware of the ghosts' presence but untroubled and uncorrupted
by it--immune, in their very innocence, to fear and guilt. The ghosts are there; perhaps the children
see them, perhaps they don't. There is no way for us to be sure, but in either case their apparent
innocence may still be innocence (728).

The story's all-pervasive adumbrations of sexual evil, according to Bontly, emanate from the
obsessions of the governess, as she projects her own sexual problems onto the children and Quint
and Jessel.

Although the ghosts may well be objective presences and although they may constitute a real threat
to the children, it is the governess herself who, with an assist from Mrs. Grose, invests the ghosts
with their sexual significance. It is she who instinctively identifies sex with the powers of darkness
and evil, and who conjures up the murky atmosphere of sexual perversity which infests Bly. The
ghosts themselves remain, as it were, asexual. They appear; they glare at the governess; they look
around, apparently for the children; they go away (727).

The governess's projections, according to Bontly, arise from problems derived from her own
socialization: "Her horror must be seen as a result of her own intense vision of sexual evil" (728).

To support this interpretation, Bontly, like Siegel, cites instances in which "the governess . . . finds
herself occupying the same position in which she has seen one of the ghosts, or recreating their
movements and actions" (728-29). He also, in line with his "masculinist" approach, analyzes the
visions of Quint to demonstrate that the governess fears Quint as a masculine invader of the
feminized domestic circle . . . his handsome brutality, his fixed stare, and his aggressive aspect all
reinforce our sense that the animosity between them is inherently sexual. The governess's fear and
hatred of Quint seems based not so much on his ghostliness as on his masculinity (729).

For example, his appearance on the tower "suggests . . . the dominance and power of the male set
in station above the female." He is next seen looking in the window of the dining room--"an
interloper challenging her authority in the home." The foregoing interpretation would seem
applicable also to his final appearance at the story's end. He appears once, late at night, on the
stairway which "leads to her bedroom" (729). Similarly, part of her conflict with Miles, suggests
Bontly, results from her "maternal protectiveness" combined with "a notable lack of insight into
the psychology of adolescent males" (725)--i.e., her failure to understand Miles's desire to return to
a boys' boarding school.

Because the governess lacks insight into her own psychology, she misinterprets the psychology of
the children and the nature and significance of the ghosts. These misinterpretations, in Bontly's
view, explain James's own contention that, while the governess has kept `crystalline her record of
so many intense anomalies and obscurities,' the philosophical conclusions we can draw from them
may be altogether `a different matter' (724).

Bontly is particularly reminiscent of Costello in his emphasis on the contrast between the bare
facts as they are narrated and the quite different story which emerges through the governess's
unreliable deductions.

Bontly is reminiscent of Hoffmann, Lydenberg, and Firebaugh in his insistence that the ghosts
harm the children through the governess. He is particularly reminiscent of Firebaugh in his
emphasis on the governess's unwise and harmful attempts to shield the children from knowledge.
Her tendency to equate evil with sexual knowledge, Bontly reminds us, is at the root of her all-
pervasive suspicion of the children. She unhesitatingly assumes that, if the children are aware of
the ghosts, they must have been corrupted by them (727). Furthermore, her desire to shield the
children causes her to expose herself in their stead. This leads to an accentuation of her own sexual
impulses--in particular, her attraction to Miles, exemplified in her entrance to his bedroom in
chapter seventeen and her comparing of herself and Miles to a married couple in chapter twenty-
two. In other words, "her treatment of the boy paradoxically combines her desire to keep him
sexually ignorant and innocent and her impulse to act as if he were a mature and knowledgeable
adult" (731). We see in her, suggests Bontly, a brilliant illustration of the psychology of the censor:

. . . for by determining--with a lack of logic almost comic, were it not so frighteningly typical of all
self-appointed censors--that the children, at all cost to herself, shall know nothing of the ghosts,
she has made their knowledge, rather than their physical or moral welfare, the crucial issue. She
has equated innocence with ignorance and knowledge with corruption, and she has assumed, in the
greatest )non-sequitur( of all, that her exposure to corruption will in some manner make it
impossible for the ghosts to corrupt the children. The obvious and more logical alternative, which
she seems never to consider, is that the ghosts will corrupt the children )through( her. We may just
invert her proposition: the more she sees, the more, ultimately, will they be forced to see (725-26).

The children, Bontly suggests, finally come to see themselves, their sexuality, and the ghosts
through the eyes of the governess. The horror of this vision causes Flora's psychological and
Miles's physical destruction.

The governess's final and fatal error in judgment is her assumption that, in order to be saved from
the apparitions, the children must be made to feel her own sense of guilt and horror--must see the
ghosts as she sees them. It is this )adult( awareness of evil that she labors to produce in them, and
which she finally succeeds in inflicting upon them (731-32).

In so doing, she makes the ghosts evil. They "--whatever they were to the children before--become,
through the governess's prodding, definite, frightening, corrupting realities" (732).

Bontly's essay is an outstanding example of psychoanalytic criticism focusing on a fictional

character. Bontly offers profound insights into the psychology of the governess but does not turn
the literary work into a psychiatric case history. Instead, he subordinates his perspicacious
observations of her psychology to two larger purposes: the delineation of the story's thematic
content and an explanation of its profound effect on so many readers.

We have seen how Bontly's psychoanalysis of the governess has suggested an important theme--
evil is not to be viewed as emanating from the flesh per se (as Puritans might suggest) or as an
eternal principle existing independently of the human condition (as Manichaeans might suggest),
but rather as an inescapable consequence of human finitude. We have seen how Bontly derives
other themes from his analysis of the governess's experience--for example, an explanation of the
psychology of the censor and the deleterious effects of the censorial mindset.

Bontly's insights into the psychology of the governess are integrated into his discussion of the
story's effects on the reader; thus, his article is secondarily an exercise in reader-response criticism.
Bontly suggests that, because socialization requires repression of sexual impulses, the readers of
the governess's narrative share in her more or less universal tendency to associate the horrific and
the erotic, an association which the psychologist would doubtless explain through the origins of
fear in the individual's sense of sexual guilt (728).

Consequently, says Bontly, James's plan to let the reader fill in the blanks from his own experience
has been successful:

James's readers have seldom failed to supply him with all the particulars the story demands, thus
proving that the ghosts which haunt the governess, and which finally come to haunt the children,
are the ghosts which--to some extent, at least--must haunt us all (735).

We have suggested that the psychoanalytic criticism can be divided into source studies which
attempt to prove that an author drew upon writings such as those of Freud and interpretations
which assume that authors unconsciously intuit deep truths which psychoanalysts have made
explicit. Bontly's essay is explicitly of the latter type. "It is not necessary," Bontly tells us, to
impute any special, technical knowledge of Freudian theories to James in order to see that he has
drawn upon this residue of unconscious guilt not only in his characterization of the governess, but
in his direction of the reader's response to the ghosts (728).
4. Aswell

E. Duncan Aswell's approach is, in some ways, strikingly similar to P. N. Siegel's and Bontly's
approaches. Like Siegel, Aswell considers the ghosts externalizations of the governess's repressed
erotic drives and provides examples of behavior on her part which mirrors the behavior of the
specters. Like Bontly, Aswell contends that the governess destroys the children by communicating
to them her own corrupting, guilty, fearful visions. Aswell succinctly and eloquently sums up the
process whereby the governess destroys the children:

. . . the governess not only creates the activities of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel out of her
imagination; it is she herself who is the intruding ghost at Bly, carrying out the functions and
duties she ascribes to her supposed enemies. Her puritanical morality requires that salvation can
occur only after the confession of sins. And in order to wring a confession from the tortured
children, she is forced to act out the parts of their fiendish tempters in order that she may then act
out the part of the angelic deliverer and save them . . . . The tale's tragic irony resides in the fact
that the governess succeeds in the first half of her evangelical errand--she leads the children to an
awareness and acknowledgement of evil--but she fails in the second, the salvation of their souls
(50).

Like Bontly, Aswell emphasizes the governess's all-pervasive sexual guilt and contends that this
guilt partially explains her need of the specters. For the ghosts, according to Aswell, do not only
represent the fulfillment of unconscious erotic fantasies concerning the employer and/or Miles.
They also help "to explain her ambivalent and troubling fears about Miles and to justify her own
role as a fierce and possessive protector of his and Flora's innocence" (53). These fears arise partly
from the puritanism which accompanies her sexual guilt. Thus Aswell--like Firebaugh, Bontly, and
others--sees in the governess a mistaken tendency to identify knowledge with evil. Her "incapacity
to distinguish growth from corruption" (62), according to Aswell, leads her to "rescue Miles and
Flora from the pains of growth and maturity by preserving them from experience of any sort" (54).
This determination leads, with tragic necessity, to the spiritual death of Flora and the physical
death of Miles. Aswell reminds us that the governess is enamored of a vision of Miles as a
changeless creature who is not affected by the passage of time and untroubled by the principle of
growth: `I remember feeling with Miles in especial as if he had, as it were, no history' (53).

This changelessness, says Aswell, is finally achieved by death:

. . . by closing her eyes to the realities of human existence, she is able to preserve her ideal
untouched, to save Miles, at least, from the contamination of the world, and to retain in her own
mind an image of him perpetually young and undefiled. . . . We as readers are shocked at the
results of her labors (62).

Perhaps the most important of these "realities" is our "existence in a world . . . where the untainted
and untainting choice is impossible." Like all fanatics, however, she fails to act upon her sense of
what is between herself and Miles, just as she repudiated any link between the ghosts and herself.
She prefers the morally simplistic view that she alone is radiantly innocent and she alone knows
the requirements for salvation. Her choice condemns herself to isolation and Miles to death (62).

Aswell, like all good psychoanalytic critics, does not turn the novella into a clinical case history.
His analysis of the governess's psychology is undertaken to highlight a theme of universal
significance--the spurious attractiveness of puritanism: "For all of us seek to preserve the innocent
from corruption, though we must finally acknowledge that experience is not necessarily evil" (62).
In analyzing the psychology of the governess, Aswell is attempting to explain the story's effect on
so many readers. He suggests that the governess's psychology is a part of "most of us":

The imaginations of James's readers have been horrified and perplexed by this completely non-
supernatural portrait of a woman who peers into the blackness of her soul and then, like most of us,
withdraws her gaze (63).

Finally, Aswell demonstrates his awareness of literary realities by placing The Turn of the Screw
within the totality of the Jamesian canon. It is, he reminds us, "the first of many stories centering
around the idea of the appaller appalled, the individual faced with the dark side of his own
personality and forced to come to terms with it" (63)--i.e., "The Jolly Corner," The Sense of the
Past, and the first volume of A Small Boy and Others.

Although he does not turn the tale into a psychiatric case history, Aswell does provide profound
insights into the psychology of the governess. Perhaps his most distinctive contribution is his
detailed analysis of the apparitions in chronological succession to demonstrate how the "clarity and
control of the opening episodes gradually give way . . . to frenzy, confusion, and obscurity" as "the
governess grows less, not more certain of reality . . . and her reporting of the events becomes
increasingly fuzzy, ambiguous, and unreliable" (50).

Aswell divides the eight ghostly appearances into three subsets: the first three, which "establish
beyond question the identity of the ghosts with the governess, but confirm her in her belief that
they represent the children's corrupted past and corruptible future" (55); the second three, which
"have nothing to do with the children . . . [and] impress upon her consciousness the ghosts' relation
to herself" (55); and the last two, which complete the carefully diagrammed pattern by means of
which James reveals the true nature of the ghosts . . . [and] [which] enable the children to identify
the fiends with the governess herself (59).

During the first apparition, according to Aswell, the governess has the most insight into and
control over her own mental processes. Her references to The Mystery of Udolpho and Jane Eyre,
according to Aswell, as well as her comparisons--"definite as a picture in a frame," for example,
and "I saw him as I see the letters I form on this page"--suggest that "Quint is an artifact created by
herself . . . and is as much under her control at this point as the narrative she is so beautifully
constructing" (50-51).

When Quint appears for the second time, however, according to Aswell, the governess has lost the
control she wielded in the garden. Now she steps into the frame she had placed around the
apparition and can find no way to explain her behavior. Thus, though she can say of the spectre
this time, too, `He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him,' she can only describe
her own actions in the most tentative manner: `It was confusedly present to me that I ought to
place myself where he had stood.'

In this scene, suggests Aswell, "the exchange of looks between Quint and the governess" and the
way the governess frightens Mrs. Grose indicate "a similarity in behavior" between the governess
and the ghosts, which "will be emphasized more and more forcefully as the story goes on" (51).

The first appearance of Jessel, according to Aswell, epitomizes "the way in which she externalizes
her own grasping appropriation of the children. . ." (54). Aswell points out how the governess
stares at Flora, exactly what she is accusing Miss Jessel of doing. He also observes how, in the
ensuing conversation, "Mrs. Grose reacts to her interlocutor as if the governess herself were the
ghost"--i.e., how she "fell back a step" and "stared" at the governess's eyes "as if they might have
resembled" the eyes of the fiendish spectre (53). Aswell also reminds us that this vision occurs
after the governess has received the letter from Miles's school and discussed with Mrs. Grose the
depravity of Quint and Jessel:

The ghosts appear, thus, when the governess is both aware of the corruption which threatens the
children and convinced of her own power to preserve them untainted . . . and she determines to
rescue Miles and Flora from the pains of growth and maturity by preserving them from experience
of any sort (53-54).

The next three apparitions, Aswell reminds us, concern only the governess, not the children. The
governess encounters first Quint, then Jessel, in the dead of night when the children are not
present. Aswell reminds us that these "appearances are not correlated with the behavior of the child
each is supposed . . . to have returned to possess." Quint materializes when Flora is out of bed, and
she sees Miss Jessel when she is hunting for Quint. "Furthermore, in her ensuing conversation with
Mrs. Grose," says Aswell, "her omission of the fact that the demons have appeared inside the
house is particularly striking" (56). Obviously, Miss Jessel's "sobbing figure is seen to represent
the governess herself, bowed down by doubts about the justice of her cause and her sorrow for the
evil she and the children must face." Later the governess finds herself sitting on the same step in
the same posture. When she meets Quint, Aswell points out, the exchange of looks is prolonged
and soul- searching, and this time the two personalities are more explicitly interchangeable. `He
knew me as well as I knew him,' the governess states . . . . Before that minute passes . . . a
frightening loss of identity takes place, during which she wonders `if even )I( were in life' (55).

Then in the schoolroom, "she meets for the third and last time that other side of herself not in any
way disguised as a representation of the children." This vision occurs, Aswell reminds us,
immediately after she sinks down on the staircase and "imagines herself to be as reprehensible as
her corrupted predecessor." She shrieks angrily at the apparition "in order to repudiate any
resemblance between herself and her vision of the former governess." This repudiation is
climactic, according to Aswell. "From now on the ghosts appear only outside and only in
conjunction with the children" (57).

Finally, in the last two encounters the children identify the governess with Quint and Jessel. In a
manner reminiscent of Muriel West, Aswell points out how the governess "conjures up" (60) Quint
by her relentless questioning of Miles and how the child's final cry "is addressed to the governess
and Quint inter-changeably, the two roles assumed for Miles by his mentor." Aswell also, like
West, contends that the governess's ambiguous pronoun `we' is revealing. It cannot refer to Mrs.
Grose and herself and so can only point unconsciously to her collaboration with the other side of
herself, acting as her wicked predecessor. Her statement also suggests that Miles has learned about
Flora's misfortune, and that his only acquaintance with the demons is through the events
precipitated by the governess, which have forced the dead servants upon the consciousness of
those at Bly (61).

Interestingly, Aswell suggests that the governess deliberately entices Miles to commit wrongdoing
by leaving her letter to the employer where Miles would be likely to see it and steal it. Her motive,
suggests Aswell, is to "directly implicate Miles and Flora in the evil that threatens them, force
them to acknowledge it explicitly, and so `save' them" (58). At this point, however, the governess
has forgotten that the acknowledgement of evil was to be only a means toward the end of
salvation. It has become the end in itself, and by embodying a dread vision of sin without
redemption the governess most cruelly and ironically acts out the parts of Miss Jessel and Peter
Quint that she had begun by imagining under her control (60).

Similarly, the final appearance of Jessel confirms the identity between the governess and the
ghosts:

Instead of glancing at the `prodigy' announced by the governess, the child turns upon the accuser
herself `an expression of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely new and unprecedented and
that appeared to read and accuse and judge me' (59).

The governess, suggests Aswell, is appalled at the success of her own work:

. . . by arousing Flora to an awareness of evil, she has forced the child abruptly and prematurely
into responsible and painful maturity . . . . the violent change she has effected in Flora is signalled
by the vile language the child later uses, while the governess's responsibility for her corruption is
underlined by her thanking God at Mrs. Grose's report (59).

Aswell's essay is an outstanding example of psychoanalytic criticism focusing on a fictional

character. His analysis of the psychodynamic significance of the chronological sequence of
apparitions is original and profound. He has, like all good psychoanalytic critics, integrated these
insights into explanations of the work's thematic content and its effects on the reader.

C. Psychoanalytic Criticism Focusing on the Reader: Willen

We have seen that all good psychoanalytic literary criticism at some point addresses the effect of
the work on the reader. However, all of the psychoanalytic studies during this period--with the
exception of Willen and Spilka (who, because of his sociological orientation will be discussed in
the next section of this chapter) --focused primarily on either the author or one or more fictional
characters. Gerald Willen was an exception. His preface to A Casebook on Henry James's The
Turn of the Screw is concerned primarily with the psychodynamics of the reader's response.

Willen's preface is not, like Norman Holland's essay on "The Purloined Letter," a detailed analysis
of the psychology of one particular reader; it is, instead, a reflection on how the structures of the
novella-- particularly its Kermodean lacunae--profoundly affect so many readers.

The terror of the children, according to Willen, "evokes--subconsciously in all probability--the

love and terror [the reader] felt as a child." The maternal characteristics of the governess, Willen
suggests, further this regression by reproducing the reader's childhood relationship to his mother.
Hence, we have such a variety of readings--pro-governess and anti-governess and positions in
between; for every . . . analysis is conditioned by the reader's childhood experiences and emotional
responses to them. I would say, then, that the variety of interpretations accorded `The Turn of the
Screw' originates in the variety of these experiences and responses (vii).

The reader is led to fill in the blanks--as James hoped he would be--by the Kermodean lacunae, or,
in Willen's words, "the ambiguity of the writing" (vii). Furthermore, the device of having this
central narrator be a governess--a mother substitute--quite probably sets up a certain receptiveness
in the reader that may account for the multitude and variety of interpretations of the story (vi).

This "receptiveness" is protected, Willen suggests, by devices which cushion the reader's contact
with disturbing memories. Thus, the central narrator is a governess rather than a mother. The
narrative frame-- whereby the reader receives the story only after it has passed through three
narrators is, says Willen, a deliberate "device" which "removes the reader from direct and possibly
inhibiting contact with his own childhood fantasies, thus freeing him for an apparently objective
analysis of the story" (vii).

Willen, therefore, has sought not to argue for one interpretation as opposed to others, but instead to
explain the plethora of readings and the equally profound effects seemingly diverse interpretations
have had on so many readers. The many readings, Willen suggests, are, in effect, based in part on
the `real' terrors evoked by the governess and in part on the subconscious memory of our imagined
childhood terrors. In other words, what James has done in this story to produce such responses is to
particularize the universal, where Sophocles, for example, in )Oedipus( has universalized the
particular (vii).

4- Criticism Synthesizing Psychoanalytic and Related Approaches

with Marxist and Related Approaches
During this period a number of interpretations appeared which synthesized psychoanalytic and
sociological insights.

1. Spilka

Mark Spilka's interpretation bore striking resemblance to the interpretations of Lydenberg and
Bontly. In an acknowledgment of a debt to Lydenberg, Spilka maintained "that the ghosts are
somehow real, that they symbolize some `generalized evil' which the governess exacerbates for
neurotic ends" (105). Spilka then, in a manner reminiscent of Bontly, qualifies his agreement with
Lydenberg by maintaining that the "generalized evil" is specifically sexual--the governess "is not
merely . . . sensitive . . . she is sensitive to sex ghosts, especially those who appear to children. . ."
(105). In formulations reminiscent of Bontly, Spilka defines the governess's "neurosis" as a
culturally induced rejection of adult sexuality, which, because sexuality can never be repressed
with complete success, leads to prurience, all-pervasive sexual guilt, and intolerance. "Prurience is
the condition which [this] tale records," says Spilka, "especially as it relates to saintliness, for
which combination his governess becomes the perfect medium" (105). "In other words," he later
asserts, she wants to extend the Edenic bliss of childhood into adulthood. But at this point the
intruding ghost appears on a tower which had often stirred her romantic fancies. The intruder
supplants another object of romantic fancy, her master and the children's uncle, whom she dreams
of meeting now on the path, smiling and approving, as in a `charming story'. . . . Now she is
sensitive to sexual evil, the fearsome side of romantic love, the disruptive threat to the world of
garden and park which the governess, like the children, must outgrow (106).

Spilka, of course, agrees with Wilson that the sexual relationship between Quint and Jessel mirrors
the governess's longed for sexual relationship with the employer.

Spilka praises Lydenberg for the latter's willingness "to discuss the story's cultural implications"
(107). He questions, however, Lydenberg's assumption that the governess's psychological
problems arise from "that New England Puritanism with which James was most familiar" (107),
noting that the story takes place in Victorian England. He then goes beyond Lydenberg and the
other psychoanalytic critics we have discussed by grounding the story not only in a particular
culture--that of Victorian England--but, more importantly, in what Marxists would term the
"economic substructure" of that culture--its particular divisions of labor and distribution of
resources and the consequent conflicts between classes at that point in history. Spilka theorizes as
to how that economic substructure gave rise to an ideological superstructure influencing the
mindset of James and many other contemporary authors. He is thus able to relate the story to
James's other works--thus, his criticism is authorial--and to broad trends in Victorian literature. He
sees the governess as a victim of "those conflicting cultural attitudes which James was then
exploring" (105). In the course of developing this interpretation Spilka offers an explanation of the
psychodynamics of the reader's response to the story.

According to Spilka, the "sexual neurosis" (109) of the governess--and of James himself--was
engendered by "the intense domesticity of Victorian times," which was an offshoot of the
industrial revolution and early capitalism:

The Victorian home may be seen . . . as a defensive reaction against those inroads on family life
which later produced our own domestic freeways. Victorian middle-class homes were, by contrast,
domestic sanctuaries, sacred castles or fortified temples, protective bulwarks against an
increasingly hostile world of ruthless commerce, poverty and industrial blight, child and sweatshop
labor, prostitution and crime. But in the home adults might immerse themselves in family life and
salvage some humanity. Unfortunately, their normal affections were intensified by close
confinement and overstimulation. The result was a hothouse atmosphere of intense domestic
feeling; and within that hothouse certain exaggerated values flourished (108).

Among these "exaggerated values" were excessive affection tinged with prurience and puritanism
combined with all-pervasive feelings of sexual guilt. Such puritanism, according to Spilka, arose
as a natural defense against the threat which "the alarming spread of prostitution, promiscuity,
free-love cults, and salacious novels" posed to the cohesiveness of the highly valued nuclear
family structure.

For evil existed outside the home, and children had to be preserved from it. . . . the home might
tolerate commercial hardness and impiety in the world outside but it could not accommodate
sexual license (108).

The resulting combination of "extreme affection and repression," suggests Spilka, created a
situation which was just about perfect for producing sexual neurosis, if we can agree with Freud
that every child tends normally to love his parents or siblings of the opposite sex, and to hate those
of the same sex as rivals. The Victorian home so intensified that normal conflict as to thwart or
impede its eventual resolution. It seems obvious, even without Freud's theory, that Victorian sons
and daughters identified affection with the whole of love, had no way to account for sex except as
sinful, and so felt intensely guilty when love was combined with sex in marriage (109).

This all-pervasive sexual guilt, moreover, existed in conjunction with a "religious vacuum in
society" spawned by "the triumphant rise of science and materialism" (108). The result, suggests
Spilka, was a cult-like adulation of middle-class women and children, combined with patriarchal
authoritarianism.

. . . women assumed the moral and religious roles once held by churchly figures: mothers and
sisters were seen as saints and angels, vessels of spiritual perfection, guardians of faith, virtue, and
affection; children too, under the aegis of Rousseau, were considered pure and untainted, though
little girls had an apparent edge in purity; fathers, in their awareness of urban vices, took on added
harshness as disciplinarians and patriarchal protectors (108).

Such values, according to Spilka, produced many neurotics, including James and his fictional
governess. Thus, Spilka's economically grounded analysis of Victorian culture leads to an
interrelated psychoanalysis of the author and his fictional characters.

Spilka locates James squarely within the "cult of childhood innocence" which the aforementioned
sexual repressions and overvaluations of familial affection spawned. He points to the obvious
biographical details to which so many critics and biographers--Freudian and otherwise--have
called attention:

"the rivalries and affections of James's childhood, the mysterious accident in his youth, [the]
inveterate bachelorhood and secretiveness" of this often apparently asexual man who, "always
fond of a sister who went mad and a cousin who died young, wrote a first novel ()Watch and
Ward() in which a young man in his twenties adopts and raises a girl of twelve to be his wife"
(109).

Spilka sees these psychological problems clearly reflected in James's work:. . . a body of fiction in
which sex is often identified with evil and affection with the whole of love . . . his nubile maidens
and pubescent boys tend to die when faced with sexual evil . . . his heroines often renounce
marriage altogether or enter sexless compacts . . . they show exceptional concern with sheer
perception of adult sexuality (109).

Like Edel and other psychoanalytic critics I have considered in the fourth and fifth chapters of this
study, Spilka reads The Turn of the Screw as a product of a transitional stage in James's
psychological history. The governess's failure successfully to shield the children from their sex
ghosts can be seen, Spilka maintains, as a step toward . . . a recognition of the impossibility of an
adult life which excludes sexuality in the name of ideal innocence, a recognition of the impasse
which his own cultural assumptions made inevitable (110).

This psychological journey, Spilka contends, would be completed when James could write

. . . of the need to live, only to live, to get beyond perception to engagement and involvement, and,
interestingly enough, to get beyond affective innocence to the sexual basis of adult experience. In
the great recognition scene in )The Ambassadors(, when Strether sees the boat carrying two lovers
enter the frame of his aesthetic perception, the perfect picture of pastoral romance, he comes to
accept sex as the necessary source of charm and loveliness in a relation he had tried to see in terms
of sexless virtue (109).

That James's psychological problems were not idiosyncratic but culturally endemic Spilka
establishes by noting similar elements in the lives and writings of James's literary contemporaries:

The cult of childhood innocence flourished, abetted by writers like Dickens, Eliot, Carrol, Spyri,
and Barrie. At Oxford in the eighties students invited little girls (as opposed to big ones) to their
rooms for tea. Art critic Ruskin, unable to consummate his marriage, worshipped a severely
religious girl of fourteen; poet Dowson worshipped one of twelve, while at the same time going to
prostitutes; bachelor Dodgson doted all his life on little Alices (109).

Spilka suggests that the tale affects the reader through its unconscious invitations to think about
sexual corruption in children, to make us specify, )from our own experience and imagination(, the
particular depravities they absorb from evil friends . . . . to think dirty thoughts so as to release the
author from `expatiation.'

The screw is turned, Spilka suggests, as "we experience those conflicting cultural attitudes which
James was then exploring" (105). The deficiencies of Victorian culture which we experience with
the governess allow no escape from this turning and consequently entrap us in terror and horror.
We are not meant to find a solution to the dreadful situation at Bly--"we are meant, rather, to grasp
the cultural impasse of which Miles and Flora, and the governess herself, are victims" (107).

Spilka strongly criticizes Freudians who see the children as innocent victims, accusing such critics
of not being "sufficiently Freudian" (105) for two reasons: they have failed to appreciate "infantile
sexuality" and "civilization and its discontents" (110). Spilka has taken account of these central
Freudian concerns in a brilliant reading which integrates Marxist insights concerning Victorian
culture with interrelated psychoanalyses of James, his fictional characters, and the Victorian and
contemporary readers of the story.

Lydenberg commented briefly on Spilka's article, praising Spilka's insights concerning elements of
Victorian culture reflected in the tale but concluding with this reservation:

I remain stubbornly convinced that the ambiguity of the story is impenetrable, that James has
outwitted all his critics (the critics, not the simple readers, are the unwary he has trapped in
his )amusette() (8).

Spilka, in reply, insisted implausiblythat James limits ambiguity here to one question: the kinds of
evil inflicted upon the children by Quint and Jessel. He does not invite generalized speculation
about the whole tale (8).

This is implausible because many other interpretations --for example, Goddard's--are just as
defensible as Spilka's admittedly brilliant reading. Moreover, critics have raised questions about
many aspects of the story--i.e., the character of Mrs. Grose, the motives of the employer, the
children's parents, etc. Spilka would be on firmer ground if he did not claim that his interpretation
is exclusively correct; part of the greatness of the story is its ability to yield such a rich variety of
readings. Incredibly, Lydenberg in his statement asserts in passing that "the Marxist would find
slim pickings" (7) in interpreting the story--apparently oblivious to Spilka's brilliant grounding of
the governess's psychology in the class conflicts of Victorian England.

2.Rees

Richard Rees, like Nardin (to be discussed in the next chapter), sees Quint and Jessel as good
people in love but tragically constricted by the economic realities of Victorian Britain. Their love,
transcending class differences, was the "crime" which angered Mrs. Grose, "a prejudiced witness,"
bitter because she "was not offered the same temptations as Miss Jessel" by the sexually attractive
Peter Quint ("we have it on Mrs. Grose's own word that to everyone except herself he was
irresistible") (118). Rees also, like Nardin, suggests that Quint and Jessel had a loving relationship
with the two servants and that Miles was dismissed from school for speaking openly about this
cross-caste relationship. The governess is correct in her perception that the children are "haunted,"
according to Rees; they are haunted, however, not by evil influences, but by "memories of the
warmth and vitality and kindness of their `infamous' friends" (123). Thus, suggests Rees, the
governess, although well intentioned, is destructive, and Quint and Jessel are revolutionary heroes:

James had an extremely perspicacious and disillusioned view of the role of money in social life.
He certainly knew that marriage between a rich man and a poor girl seldom has revolutionary
implications, because the girl can usually adapt herself without difficulty to her husband's
environment, whereas it is a serious matter when a girl steps out of the privileged circle for the
sake of a man lower down in the social and economic scale. It is arguable that, until the far-off day
when money ceases to dominate human life, this action, in which love outweighs all other
considerations, will remain one of the few revolutionary and heroically moral actions within the
scope of an ordinary woman who is neither a saint nor a genius (123-24).

While Rees's interpretation accounts for Miles's expulsion from school, the children's strange
silence about Quint and Jessel, and Mrs. Grose's negative--though vague--evaluation of the two
dead servants, it does not explain why the governess sees the specters. Rees merely remarks in
passing that "even if the ghosts were a figment of [the governess's] imagination . . . . the children
were in some way obsessed with Miss Jessel and Peter Quint. . ." (121). This is a major weakness
in his criticism.

On the other hand, Rees has combined Marxist insights concerning class conflicts with a
theological approach which allows us to read the tale as a story about good and evil.

For, to pursue "a detailed and objective examination of our own and other people's economic
behavior," says Rees, is to recognize the implausibility of "the belief that anything remotely
resembling the kingdom of heaven exists or ever will exist around us in this world" (17). Thus, we
see in The Turn of the Screw how people act when money and class interests are involved, and
such a vision can be a "corrective of any such fallacy" as human perfectibility. Rees terms his
approach economic existentialism. By this I mean the application to economics of the sort of
existentialist analysis that Kierkegaard applied to Christianity when he defined a professor of
theology as a professor of the fact that God was spat upon and crucified (17).

3. Stone

Albert F. Stone, Jr. also synthesizes Freudian and Marxist insights, reading the tale as a story about
the problem of social class stratification and the religious psychology of a person occupying a
peculiarly vulnerable but important position in that social system (92).

Stone suggests that "victimization" would be "almost inevitable for children in the situation of
Miles and Flora" because of the Victorian social structure portrayed in the story and symbolized by
Bly itself. The indifference of the uncle, Stone reminds us, was typical in upper class families and
is reflected in numerous situations throughout James's canon. In this canon such indifference
frequently leads to reliance on "one devoted person, a tutor (like Morgan's Pemberton), a nurse
(like Maisie's Mrs. Wix), or a governess, who remains true to a trust that all too often goes
unappreciated and unpaid" (91). In this story the "tragic limitation" is a mindset which is a natural
consequence of the social and economic situation in which the governess finds herself. On the one
hand, her hopeless situation has led to an understandable infatuation for the employer; on the other
hand, the limited opportunities of her poverty stricken rural environment and the severe emotional
and behavioral repressions which Victorian society imposed on middle class people--particularly,
unmarried women--have bred in her a lack of sophistication which makes it impossible for her to
understand the situation and a rigidity which makes it impossible for her to be tolerant of the
inextricable mixture of good and evil which exists in all people. Thus, the children are victimized
by psychological realities which are socially engendered. Moreover, the evil represented by Quint
and Jessel is sociologically colored, if not sociologically engendered. "We gradually learn," says
Stone, "how Peter Quint, when he was alive, manipulated the class situation to his licentious ends"
(94). Consequently, while Stone is careful to deny that "the story can be reduced to this
dimension," he insists that "the ghosts are in one sense . . . personifications of past and present
social iniquity at Bly" (95-96).
Stone--like other critics, such as Bontly and Spilka--contends that the ghosts must be accepted as
real in the tale's imaginary world.

As for the `reality' of the ghosts themselves, we must, I feel, accept the governess's word. They
exist for her as they must exist for the reader. . . . The supernatural is a necessary part of the world
at Bly as it is at Elsinore (89).

He maintains, however--alluding to James's distinction in the Preface between the events

themselves and "her interpretation of them"--that the ghosts are not the only source of evil; evil has
other dimensions--among them, sociological ones--which this vicar's daughter cannot see.
Accordingly, we must not limit ourselves to the perspective of the young girl who relates her battle
with the phantoms. A further aspect of the tale's reality--and this is something that the governess
does not realize--is the sense of evil pervading everything. Corruption is clearly in the ghosts and
may have infected Flora and Miles, but there are other and more subtle forms of iniquity abroad.
Evil has tainted the thoughts and actions of the children's companion and even of the good
housekeeper. It also exists in the world beyond Bly. The master in Harley Street bears a share of
the general evil which the young lady finds in the ghosts but which the reader sees not merely in
Quint but as omnipresent. Just as, in willing suspension of disbelief, one accepts the spirits, so
ought we to acknowledge the pervasive miasma of sin in this story. Like any work of art, )The
Turn of the Screw( enacts its own rules of reality (89-90).

The governess's failure to appreciate these realities, Stone suggests, is, in part, the cause of the
children's victimization.

The governess destroys the children, Stone suggests, through the application of "a shallow and
dangerous Christianity that by turns sentimentalizes and derogates the innocence of youth" (98).

Stone, like Firebaugh, sees in the governess a false savior whose "salvation" consists of
imprisonment in perpetual inexperience and ignorance. He reminds us of how, in their
confrontation on the way to church, the governess has "unconsciously" become "the sexual
aggressor," denying Miles's "valid" desire to leave Bly and his possessive governess (94). He also
recalls that, in the story's final scene, Quint is described as`a sentinel before a prison.' May not
Miles's desperate search for a way out of the prison of Bly mean that the governess and not the
ghost is his warden? It is she who has sought to repress the child's natural desire to see the world
(97).

Her desire to deny knowledge to others, of course, is complemented by a desire to know

everything herself. Stone likens her to Oedipus for her "dreadful boldness of mind" which "urges
her to uncover every secret." This insatiable hounding finally destroys the children, driving Flora
to physical and emotional prostration and Miles to death. Furthermore, like Lydenberg, Stone
suggests that part of this passion for knowledge is a desire to witness the destruction of others.
Perhaps evil comes to full flowering in Miles and Flora because the governess wants it to be there.

`But I shall get it out of you yet!' is her cry to poor timid Mrs. Grose. To herself she confesses, `all
the justice within me ached for proof that it [Miles's imagination of all evil] could ever have
flowered into an act.' Like Oedipus, too, the young guardian at Bly exhibits at times )hubris( so
boundless that even the disclosure of Flora's depraved vocabulary is welcomed because it `so
justifies' her suspicions. But though the girl shares with the Greeks a belief in `absolute
intelligence,' she never, within the narrative at least, achieves that spiritual humility before the
gods which would make her a genuinely religious person. She can perhaps unravel the Sphinx's
riddle of original sin but she never arrives at Colonus (98).

This hubris and suspiciousness of others are linked to a naive and unsophisticated view of good
and evil. The governess can see both herself and others only as completely good or utterly evil.

Hers is a religious imagination that defines iniquity as an either-or condition. One is either pure or
vile, never a human mixture. Thus the language of her naive dualism converts Flora at one bound
from `angel' to `demon.' As for the boy, `If Miles is innocent, what, then, am I?' is her instinctive
query to Mrs. Grose when doubts begin to assail them (97).

In her naivete, the governess, like Mrs. Grose, is something of a child herself, according to Stone.
Thus, "four children . . . are left alone to confront the ghosts at Bly" (86). So the entire story is
about childhood--specifically, "childish innocence and its involvement with corruption" (86).

The choice of childhood as subject, Stone reminds us, places the novella squarely within a tradition
in American fiction, already well established by the 1890's, of writing about childhood. Miles,
Flora, and the governess take their places beside Pearl and Ilbrahim, Phoebe Pyncheon and the
Snow Maiden, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Daisy Miller and Nanda Brokenham, Joan of
Arc and Maggie Johnson and the others in the cast of juvenile characters which during the
nineteenth century was so conspicuously an American contribution to world literature in contrast
to the cultural values and preoccupations associated with mature, adult social life which concerned
most European writers, thinkers, and artists (86).

Furthermore, Stone finds in Bly's children "three recognizable juvenile roles" endemic to
nineteenth century American fiction--"the precocious infant (Hawthorne's Pearl or Elsie), the Bad
Boy (Aldrich's Tom Bailey, Tom Sawyer), and the virginal maiden (Phoebe Pyncheon or Crane's
Maggie)" (87). Stone reminds us that Flora appears sophisticated beyond her years, while the
governess appears more childlike and naive than her age would suggest. Miles, of course, is at
least sometimes the Bad Boy--i.e., in his misconduct at school and his nocturnal escapade on the
lawn. However, says Stone, while James has followed nineteenth century American conventions in
his construction of these "three recognizable roles," his resolution of the typical "plot pattern" in
such stories sets him apart from other American writers. The "ironic, even tragic denouement" of
James's story contrasts sharply with the tidier outcomes of previous childish encounters with adult
sinfulness in the writings of James's fellow Americans. . . . Perhaps . . . James . . . took this oblique
way of disagreeing with his contemporaries about the value of innocence, about the significance of
a child's violent immersion in adult affairs, and about the nature and worth of moral insight based
on ignorance and inexperience, no matter how pure and blameless (89).

Such an interpretation of the story's theme is, of course, totally consistent with Stone's sociological
approach which sees the story as an indictment of the Victorian caste system. For this society, on
the one hand, overvalued innocence--particularly in middle class women such as the governess--
and, on the other hand, condoned selfishness and negligence in upper class parents, which, in turn,
frequently led to violent dispossessions of innocence. The story, Stone suggests, indicts this social
order and invites the reader to consider alternatives:

To be merely innocent is no longer a condition worth venerating by adults. But to be bereft of

innocence in the sudden, violent fashion of Miles and his governess is equally tragic--and, in a
morally aware society, unnecessary. The searing scene of Miles's dispossession is dramatically and
emotionally needed, but part of its delayed impact is the reader's realization that socially and
psychologically such moral experiences are neither necessary nor desirable. They are, in fact,
disastrous. Without directly mentioning it, James sets the reader to imagining counter-versions of
adult-child relations, like, for instance, Horace Bushnell's notions of Christian nurture, in which
childhood is protected against its own innocence and sinfulness and gradually introduced to the
meaning of moral maturity (100).

Stone's article is an outstanding example of social psychological criticism. Stone's analysis of the
story shows a clear pattern of psychological devastation caused by unjust and unhealthy social
structures. Although Stone does not, like Spilka, offer a detailed analysis as to how economic
realities engendered rigid puritanism in middle class people such as the governess, the governess's
father, and Mrs. Grose, he does, like Cole, point out how the lack of communication between
classes exacerbates the disastrous situation at Bly. "Communication between classes at Bly," Stone
reminds us, is always "strained, formal, incomplete. Even the governess's love cannot make it
otherwise" (94).

Stone never loses sight of literary realities; he never reduces the novella to a social psychological
case history or, worse, a Marxist tract. He relates The Turn of the Screw to the rest of James's
canon and to both nineteenth and twentieth century American literature --pointing out how James's
story originated in the context of a pervasive American preoccupation with childhood innocence in
the nineteenth century and prepares the way in the twentieth century for writers like Hemingway,
Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Salinger, carriers of the tradition of writing about childhood's `primal
unwarped world' that for a century and a quarter has been one distinguishing mark of our national
letters (100).

Stone is careful, also, to emphasize that sociological and psychological analyses cannot exhaust the
story's meaning. Stone reiterates Douglas's warning that "we are not necessarily to expect clear
answers to queries" about the story and emphasizes the "inescapably mysterious quality of the
events narrated" (89). Stone terms the novella "the most shadowy and elusive short story of
modern literature" (92) and specifically denies "that the story can be reduced to this [social
psychological] dimension" (95).

Moreover, Stone is always concerned with the story's effect on the reader. Here he offers a novel
twist or "turn" by suggesting a sociologically based reader-response criticism. In arguing for his
sociological interpretation of the story, Stone contends that such a reading offers a richer
experience to today's readers because historical realities have lessened the terror of the
supernatural. Thus, horror has its vogues and fashions like any other human response. What could
raise the genteel hackles of James's readers in 1898 may no longer prove so effective. Indeed, there
appear to be several reasons why the reader of the 1960's finds it difficult to respond emotionally
to The Turn of the Screw ( in the same manner as the previous two generations).

For one thing, our age is familiar with some new forms of the supernatural which render
apparitions or hallucinations tamer devices than they once were. I refer not only to our familiarity
with abnormal psychology, but also to such experiments at those of Dr. Rhine on extrasensory
perception; others might include flying saucers or the alleged achievements of the ouija board,
Madam Blavatsky, or the Society for Psychic Research. Furthermore, the twentieth century has
grown rather blase about matters of sexual perversion with which the story of Miles and Peter
Quint is unmistakably infused. Most important of all, perhaps, is the fact that the present day
reader is far less excited than he once was by intimations of human depravity and corruption. We
know too much for sure on this score to respond as we once did to hints. There is no doubt that
Hiroshima and Buchenwald have made it harder to read )The Turn of the Screw( (92-93).

Stone's suggestion that a sociological grounding is necessary for the story to be believable is
reminiscent of Goddard's suggestion that a psychological grounding is necessary for the story to be
believable ". . . for us to regard the tale as anything more than simply a scary story," Stone says,

we must be able to feel the evil in )The Turn of the Screw( as actual and necessary to the events--
`actual' in the sense that a verifiable social and psychological situation is being adumbrated,
`necessary' because the story could not be told apart from the conditions James presents. What
makes Henry James superior, to say, August Derleth or John Collier, is this huge substream of
social fact underlying his images of terror (93).

One example is particularly telling. Stone points out that anessential ingredient of the mystery and
horror of this tale consists of words and confidences that are )not( spoken. . . . This helps
immeasurably to thicken the dramatic atmosphere. . . . But secrets and silences, useful as they are
for ghostly effect, often originate in the social relation of superior and subordinate, whereby
confidences may go downward but not up (95).

Thus, the `ghostly effect' which the reader experiences is at least partly a result of sociological
realities.

5- Fraser: A Non-Marxist Sociological Approach to the

Governess's Psychological Crisis
John Fraser's interpretation grounds an analysis of the governess's psychology in historical and
sociological realities other than economic conflicts between classes. Although the governess is
English, Fraser focuses onthe peculiarly )American( nature of the governess's consciousness and
conduct--a feature that may be largely responsible for the story's having proved so much more
interesting to American than to English readers (329).

Thus, Fraser sees the story as a parable. The governess's psychological crisis and its eventual
resolution, he suggests, are representative of the experience of many protestants--particularly
Calvinists--in responding to the New World. In arguing that her experience is representative,
Fraser compares The Turn to other works by James and other American authors; his comparison of
The Turn to The Red Badge of Courage is particularly illustrative. In the process he provides an
interesting apparitionist variation on Wilson's 1938 suggestion that Jessel is the governess's
Jungian shadow.

Fraser briefly surveys the apparitionist vs. non-apparitionist debate and places himself squarely in
the apparitionist camp. He holds that the ghosts are real supernatural entities, not hallucinations.
His psychological study, accordingly, is not an attempt to elucidate unconscious motivations for
hallucinations, but rather an analysis of the governess's psychological processes as she confronts
an objectively threatening situation.

Fraser begins his analysis by noting an apparent anomaly in need of explanation--the abrupt
change in the governess following the appearance of Miss Jessel in the schoolroom in chapter
fifteen. At this point, according to Fraser, the governess exchanges her "over-scrupulousness" and
"sheer inability to come to terms with the problems" for "an almost jaunty forthrightness and
decisiveness that result very quickly in the sending away of Flora and the saving of Miles" (331).
Fraser compares this metamorphosis toother striking instances in later nineteenth and earlier
twentieth-century fiction of abrupt and major changes coming about in someone without any
orderly and explored progression from one intellectual position to another: for example, Isabel
Archer's final desperate flight from Caspar Goodwood; Clara Hopgood's decision not to marry
Baruch Cohen; Ursula Brangwyn's submissive return to Rupert Birkin at the parked car after her
flaming rejection of him; and, most notably, [the change] in Henry Fleming after he receives his
own `red badge' from the swung rifle of the fleeing soldier and rejoins his regiment (331).

Fraser finds the latter example particularly relevant to a discussion of the transformation in the
governess:

In both cases the increase in self-coherence and the power to act is great; in both the cause is
something that one would normally expect to be harmful rather than the reverse; and in both cases
the change seems to be essentially )right( in a way that testifies to deep-flowing currents in the
psyche that could almost certainly not have been redirected by ordinary ratiocinative means (331).

Each crisis is precipitated, Fraser suggests, by a "clash between . . . neo-pagan and Christian
dispositions" (332), rather than by "obvious primary and secondary sources of disturbances,"
which areinsufficient to explain the over-intensity with which the protagonists confront their
`tests.' In )The Red Badge of Courage( one cannot adequately account for Henry's flight and
subsequent near-derangement either by the crude theory that he is afraid of being killed or by the
more crude theory that he has gone into battle with over-rigid preconceptions about what he will
find there and how he should behave and that overwhelming strains arise when the actualities
increasingly fail to coincide with them. . . . Similarly, one cannot account satisfactorily for the
governess's intensities either by the undoubted atrociousness of the specters or by the equally
undoubtable fact that she has a crush on her employer and is overeager to perform dazzlingly
inside the too difficult rules that he has laid down (331-32).

Instead, Fraser says, the governess isharried towards breakdown by two irreconcilable attitudes
that have a very substantial history behind them in the American consciousness and that are being
increasingly vivified for her by the conduct of the children. On the one hand, an unqualified
acknowledgment of the immense power of evil in the universe is apparent in her whole attitude
towards the specters at the outset. . . . On the other hand, everything in the appearance of the
children serves to fortify a sense of the possible immense power of human nature when placed--as
the children, the specters apart, are placed at Bly--in seemingly near-idyllic conditions were it can
develop without warping by external pressures (332).

It is easy, of course, to see in the governess's crisis a microcosm of the crisis of the "nineteenth-
century post-Protestant American consciousness" (330). Puritan views of man as innately and
totally depraved appeared to give way to the equally extreme optimism of movements such as
Transcendentalism--with its utopian experiments--largely due to the influence of the apparently
boundless possibilities of the New World. Such unreasonable optimism, of course, would be
challenged by realities such as slavery, the Civil War, and urban slums--although Fraser does not
go into these historical particulars. He does, however, note the "immense disparity" between these
poles of human experience, concretized in The Turn of the Screw by "the immense disparity
between the children's appearance and the actuality that all the circumstances seem to be insisting
that she attribute to them" (332).

The governess, like all religious fanatics and other intolerant people, cannot accept the complex
mixture of good and evil which permeates the human world. Seeing no alternative to rigidly
classifying people and events as either totally good or totally evil, the sight of the angelic children
in communion with the evil ghosts throws her into a cognitive quandary.

Evil for her . . . is something hideous, absolute, and, in a sense, impenetrable; to believe fully in
the children's duplicity would seem to entail putting them irrevocably into the same category as
Quint and Miss Jessel; and this, when she is actually in their company, she cannot bring herself to
do. Hence her impasse (333).

This "impasse" is resolved, Fraser suggests, when the governess identifies with her "vile
predecessor" upon encountering her in the schoolroom. Fraser notes--as have Wilson, Bontly, and
others--the ways in which Miss Jessel "mirrors" the governess. Miss Jessel is sitting at the
governess's table "in an attitude of woe" and struggling with a letter to a man at the very time when
the governess is tormented by the increasingly urgent necessity of contacting the man she loves.

Whereas before she has been viewing both the specters merely as malignant and atrocious
presences altogether beyond the pale, she is now abruptly confronted with an acutely suffering
woman whose loneliness and desperation are no doubt of much the same kind as afflicted her
during the later stages of her infatuated and degrading relationship with Quint while she was still
alive. And when one enquires how it is that the governess should be assailed by the sensation that
it is she herself who is the intruder in this scene, the answer would seem to be that sufferings and
entrapments (including the entrapment of hopeless love) that have brought her in turn only a few
minutes before to sink down hopelessly on the stairs in exactly the same position as Miss Jessel
earlier--that these have brought her also to the point where the differences between the two of them
is perceptibly only one of degree not of kind, and where the sheer intensity of the other's sufferings
can acquire authority and demand respect (333).

This identification, says Fraser, leads her to "come to terms with the full facts of the children's
natures and conduct" (333), as she perceives evil, along with good, to be an inextricable part of
herself and others rather than something absolute and alien.

Fraser's interpretation of the similarity between the governess and Miss Jessel is an interesting
variation of Wilson's 1938 interpretation of Miss Jessel as the governess's Jungian shadow. Unlike
Wilson, Fraser does not cite these similarities to argue that the ghosts are unconsciously motivated
pathological hallucinations, but rather to suggest that the objective evil of Miss Jessel exists also in
the governess and that the governess's recognition of this reality is psychologically salutary.

Fraser's article is an original and thought provoking synthesis of psychoanalysis and intellectual
history, whereby the psychological problems of thegoverness are shown to exemplify problems
widely shared in a particular historical milieu and occasioned by definite historical realities. His
interpretation suggests that the governess undergoes a recovery which exemplifies a possible
solution to these problems. Unfortunately, however, Fraser too cursorily and cavalierly dismisses
the many arguments against the objective reality of the ghosts. Furthermore, Fraser may be too
complimentary in his appraisal of the governess; his opinion that she "saves" Miles, rather than
harries him to death, is certainly questionable. Furthermore, implicit in Fraser's criticism is the
germ of a promising idea which he unfortunately fails to develop. Fraser reminds us that the
governessassumes the most awful spiritual responsibilities without a flicker of a thought--in the
face of appalling demonic threats to the souls of her precious charges--about God and the
assistance of prayer.

Fraser interprets this asyet another of James's brilliant renderings of the kind of nineteenth-century
post-Protestant American consciousness that was totally without formal Christian beliefs but still
very powerfully influenced by a sense of immense ethical responsibilities (330).

Other critics (such as Briggs and Voegelin, to be discussed in the next chapter) have made similar
observations but found her prayerless and Godless approach unsuccessful, noting at the story's end
the serious illness of the implacably hostile Flora and the death of Miles with a curse on his lips.
These critics have seen the story as an indictment of Pelagianism; and Pelagian Fraser's
"nineteenth-century post-Protestant American consciousness" certainly seems to be.

6- Criticism Using The Turn of the Screw as a Focal Point for

Reflection on the Relationship Between Psychoanalysis and
Literature
1. Feinstein

Herbert Feinstein compares glove symbolism in James's The Turn of the Screw and Twain's
Innocents Abroad. He finds in both cases "that the gloves symbolize the phallus in both the male
and female unconscious mind" (352).

In Innocents Abroad American boys--"innocents"--are sold defective gloves by "a very handsome"
woman in Gibraltar, which Feinstein reminds us, is the stony gateway of two worlds from whose
rocks the Devil watches the homeward-bound voyage of Ivan Bunin's deceased `Gentleman from
San Francisco'; and the Gibraltar slopes serve as the situs for the deflowering of James Joyce's
Yea-Saying Molly Bloom (350).

The narrator pays for gloves from "the seductive Spanish wench" (358), who assured him his hand
is "a most comely member" (359). The boys are "awkward" in trying the gloves on and
"embarrassed" to be doing so in the presence of one another. The narrator feels pressured to
"deserve" the "compliments" of the woman, who remarks that "some gentlemen are . . . awkward
about putting . . . on" gloves (359). Later, "Twain's gloves are in dissolution: all ten phalli need to
be discarded. The wages of sexual anxiety is the fantasy of castration" (364).

In The Turn of the Screw, Feinstein reminds us, the governess sees Quint looking in the dining
room window when she comes into the room to retrieve her gloves which have been temporarily
forgotten. The fact that the gloves have been forgotten, says Feinstein, indicates repression. In
reflecting on "the governess . . . seeking those forgotten, guilty gloves, which, we recall, had been
repaired `with a publicity perhaps not edifying,'" Feinstein reminds us that

Freud, no less than Milton, has written a good deal about the importance of the item lost . . . . a
lapse of memory can mean different things to different men, even different things in the same man
at different times; but the lapse always does signify )something( (370).

That the "something" is sexual in this case is evident, Feinstein says, given the context of the
"lapse":

. . . one need only realize the girl enters the parlor in search of her gloves, but sees instead the dead
Quint. . . . Quint is the man who has committed forbidden sexual enormities with her predecessor
on the job, Miss Jessel . . . . James strongly implies the debased Miss Jessel had to quit Bly under
the scandal of pregnancy, and that she later died in the comeuppance of childbirth--the aftermath
of an adult sexual relationship (372).

The overall context of her "forgetting," of course, also includes her seeing Quint only from the
waist up--a fact which may indicate fear of sexuality. Also, Feinstein reminds us of how Quint
appears for the first time while the governess is daydreaming about the employer and how the
governess, near the story's end, compares herself and Miles to a newly married bride and groom.
Feinstein reminds us of the frequent use of words such as intercourse and known. To cite two
representative instances out of many possible examples, the governess refers to the apparition in
the parlor as "a forward stride in our intercourse" and to Miles as a "small helpless creature who
had been for me a reevaluation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse." This language, says
Feinstein, points unmistakably to repressed sexuality:

With his enormous gift and range in language, for James repeatedly to make offbeat use of the
noun `intercourse,' or the past participle `known' seems probative. Despite James's statement
he )meant( to write a ghost story in )The Turn of the Screw(, one need not become enmeshed in the
impossible task of sorting out James' conscious from his unconscious mind to imagine what the
language does signify (371-72).

Feinstein considers this shared symbolic import in "these two divergent writers" (351) to be a
powerful argument for the validity of psychoanalytic criticism. This shared symbolic import,
Feinstein maintains, "[makes] these two novelists secret sharers, or more properly, unconscious
users, of a funded `analogical matrix'" (350) which springs from "the same thing in the `collective
unconscious'--if I may borrow a phrase from Jung--of two American writers as different as Mark
Twain and Henry James" (374).

We have divided psychoanalytic criticism into that which focuses on the writer, the fictional
characters, or the reader and emphasized that, in all quality psychoanalytic criticism, these
distinctions represent different emphases, not mutually exclusive types--since all good
psychoanalytic criticism to some extent addresses all three concerns. Feinstein's theory of
psychoanalytic criticism focuses primarily on the author but integrates the other two approaches as
well.

The critic's task, as Feinstein sees it, is to elucidate the author's intended meaning--part or most of
which may be unconsciously intended. His approach differs from the phenomenological criticism
of Kenton in that his method of discovery is discursive reasoning about the text--its situations,
omissions, the language of the narrator and his characters, etc.--in the light of psychoanalytic
theory and biographical information about the author rather than intuitive identification with the
author. Thus, the psychoanalytic critic is a detective rather than a mystic.

We find out, however, "what, in one important way or another, is the writer's unconscious mind"
by studying the fictional works themselves, and this includes the fictional characters. Feinstein
quotes approvingly Ernest Jones's "analysis of Hamlet as a living man" and explanation of how the
critic "uses the imagined Hamlet to achieve insight into the historical Shakespeare":

An artist has an unconscious mind as well as a conscious one, said Jones, and his imagination
springs at least as fully from the former as from the latter. For these reasons I suppose to pretend
that Hamlet was a living person . . . and inquire what measure of man such a person must have
been to feel and act in certain situations in the way Shakespeare tells us he did. So far shall I be
from forgetting that he was a figment of Shakespeare's mind that I shall then go on to consider the
relation of this particular imaginative creation to the personality of Shakespeare himself (qtd. in
Feinstein 356).

Feinstein, however, is interested in understanding the author in a special way. He is not seeking to
understand the author as an historical personage per se, but rather to understand the author's
intended communication to the reader, part of which intention is unconscious. And to understand
this intention more fully is to understand the reader's response more fully, for the reader is
apprehending--consciously and unconsciously--universally understood realities, if Feinstein's
understanding is correct. Just as the writer--because of repressions--may not consciously
understand his own message, so the reader--because of repressions--may misunderstand.

The writer starts with what he wants to say; next, there is what he )thinks( he wants to say. There
follows something quite different--what he )permits( himself to say. And . . . there is what the
reader )prefers to think( the writer is saying. My further thought is that a symbol provides a
subterranean link, a shortcut, an easy way to dodge past some of the terrible barriers of
communication between men (375-76).

Thus, Feinstein's theory integrates analyses of the author, the fictional characters, and the reader.

While Feinstein argues strongly for the validity of psychoanalytic criticism, he argues just as
strongly against simplistic applications of psychoanalytic theory. "Only a fool or a fanatic--at times
one and the same--might seek to construct any glib one-to-one relationship, or equation, between
the glove and the phallus," according to Feinstein. In illustration he points to the "many things"
which a rose "may signify": . . . purity, sexual passion, even the thorns which attend it. William
Blake's `sick rose' may harbor disease. To those politically oriented, the rose may summon up mid-
fifteenth century English dynastic wars. . . . And Gertrude Stein, no literalist she, maintains that a
rose is, after all, only a rose (354).

Similarly, says Feinstein, in determining the significance of a symbol, the critic--often with
incomplete success-- meets the problems of dividing the conscious from the unconscious mind and
of separating out the premeditated, the accidental, and the incidental. . . . Does Melville himself
intend the whale to be what Melville )thinks( he does? Censorship may intervene. Outwardly,
Melville may have worked to write )exactly( what he meant, but inwardly, like the rest of us, he
struggled with the constant intra-psychical and internecine warfares of his unconscious mind. . . .
The white of the writer's conscious intent is always clouded by the yolk of his unconscious
meaning, and the reader is served up the omelet (353-54).

Consequently, in determining the significance of the governess's gloves, Feinstein echoes "Harry
Levin's caveat about overly close reading" which ignores context (368) and includes a
painstakingly thorough analysis of the context.

Feinstein does not offer a complete interpretation of The Turn of the Screw, but such an
interpretation is not his intention. "My plan," he says, "is to explore the use of symbols in literature
together with case studies of Twain and James" (35). This he has done very well.

2. Thomas

Glen Ray Thomas began by observing that "psychoanalytic literary criticism raises problems both
in psychology and in its assessment of literature as literature." His stated intention was that these
problems . . . be explored by using the psychoanalytic interpretations of Henry James's )The Turn
of the Screw( as a test case study based on a review of Freud's own work, and examined, not from
the psychologist's viewpoint, but from the viewpoint of literature and the creative process (1).

He concluded that "some of the major problems presented by this criticism in America raises [sic]
out of misunderstanding or disagreement as to what Freud's concepts of literature and the creative
process really are" (1). To make the point Thomas chose what he considered to be the six major
psychoanalytic interpretations of The Turn of the Screw and, in reviewing them, attempted "to
show specifically how they succeed and how they fail as literary criticism, and how they illustrate
some major aesthetic problems" in order to show specifically how some of the deficiencies of
individual Freudian critics may be corrected, and to suggest what aspects of psychoanalytic theory
may and may not be legitimately used in literary criticism (3).

Thomas was only partially successful in carrying out these ambitious undertakings. In the first
place, his choice of interpretations is too incomplete to be representative. He discusses Wilson,
Geismar, Cargill, Goddard, Feinstein, and Cranfill and Clark--whose readings he terms "the six
major interpretations" (6). The list includes Geismar,2 whose interpretation I consider relatively
insubstantial, and excludes such outstanding essays as those of Bontly, Aswell, Aldrich, Katan,
Edel, Stone, Rees, and Spilka. This incompletely representative list gives a distorted picture of
psychoanalytic criticism. For example, his generalization that psychoanalytic critics
"characteristically stress that the governess is mentally ill" would not apply to the sociologically
grounded essays of Spilka, Bontly, Stone, or Rees. These critics assert that the governess is
normal. Secondly, Thomas fails to do justice to some of the critics he does discuss.

For example, Thomas accuses Wilson of basing his interpretation solely on two symbols-- the
tower upon which Quint first appears is a phallic symbol, and the lake beside which Miss Jessel
appears is presumably a vaginal symbol, though Wilson never clearly specifies its meaning.

He adds, ‘The critic who interprets a literary work on the basis of two symbols ought to
demonstrate that these unify the work as a whole and support its thematic development’ (37).

As I demonstrated, convincingly I hope, in the third chapter of this dissertation, Wilson's 1934
article relied on argumentation of three kinds: internal evidence from the story, including but not
limited to the two above symbols; James's statements about the story in the Preface to Volume 12
of the New York Edition and his decision to include the tale in the same volume with The Aspern
Papers, The Liar, and The Two Faces; and a consideration of broad patterns of personality and
conduct which seem to permeate the entire Jamesian canon. Far from failing to "unify the work as
a whole and support its thematic development," Wilson's brilliant work of authorial criticism, by
locating at least some of James's problems in his particular historical and sociological milieu and
demonstrating how the Jamesian pattern is mirrored in the sociologically influenced psychological
problems of the governess and other Jamesian characters, opened the door to a fusion of Freudian
and Marxist insights.

Also, by his discussion of the reasons for the Victorian public's rejection of The Bostonians and
lukewarm reception of much of James's other fiction, Wilson opened the door to a greater
awareness of sociological considerations when evaluating reader responses. Wilson's suggestion of
how the public reaction to the subject matter of The Bostonians may have inhibited a frank
treatment of sexual material in The Turn of the Screw is an important insight into the ways in
which literary works can be partly shaped by the anticipated response of a particular public.
Wilson's 1938 essay suggested that Quint and Jessel's sexual relationship represented an
unconsciously desired sexual relationship between the governess and the employer. This
explanation, as we have pointed out, opened Jungian doors and shed additional light on a number
of important scenes in the story. It also opened the door to Cole's social psychological reading
which sees the governess possessed by "hysteria caused by her repression of her awareness that
social inequities will frustrate her love for her employer" (Cole 1).

Incredibly, Thomas opines that Feinstein's "analysis amounts to little more than a search for genital
and coital symbols." Thus, he summarily dismisses Feinstein: The result of his search is an
unorganized mass of disjunct sexual and religious symbols, integrated neither psychologically nor
artistically. For example, the governess's gloves as the major symbol represents [sic] secrecy, fear
of nudity, five phalli, and a vagina; and because they have been repaired with three stitches, they
are related by that number to Christianity (the Holy Trinity?) and to the male genitals. How these
symbols are to be integrated into some coherent statement about the story is left unclear. Mr.
Feinstein continues, though, by some undefined method of his own, to equate rain with birth,
Church with male and female genitals, and the stairs and the procession to the church with sexual
intercourse (39).

As I hope I have shown in my discussion of Feinstein, his main point is that the gloves are a
phallic symbol. The other "symbols" are mentioned in passing in one paragraph of Feinstein's long
article. Far from engaging in such ridiculously simplistic symbolic inreading, Feinstein takes great
pains to insist that the entire context must be considered in the interpretation of any symbol. In the
course of the one paragraph to which Thomas so misrepresentingly alludes, Feinstein throws down
this caveat:

To the skeptic--choose any four out of eight! [of the "symbols" enumerated]. It is the )Gestalt(, the
`analogical matrix,' which counts. Text as well as context must win the psychological case or lose
it (371).

Thomas also ignores Feinstein's stated purpose in this article, which is to discuss the validity of
psychoanalytic literary criticism, not to construct an "interpretation" of The Turn of the Screw,
"coherent" or otherwise.

Thomas's discussion of Cargill's essay is little more than a listing of differences between the
experiences of James's fictional governess and those of the governess in Freud's case history. We
are reminded, for example, that James's governess, unlike Miss Lucy R., saw her employer only
once and told that "Miss Lucy's mild conversions are paltry affairs in comparison to the
governess's hallucinating state" (40). Thomas is apparently forgetting that a work of fiction cannot
resemble a literary source in every respect without becoming merely a transcription of the source.

Thomas is also unfair when he says that "Thomas Cranfill and Robert Clark approach `The Turn of
the Screw' as if it were a psychiatric case study rather than a work of fiction" (19-20). As I hope I
have shown in my discussion of Cranfill and Clark, their "psychiatric" data was largely material--
Parish's work, for example --which James could reasonably be expected to have read. One can
hardly construct a literary source study of a fictional character while pretending to be considering a
real person. Also, Cranfill and Clark specifically state that "we should persist in regarding The
Turn of the Screw as primarily a work of art" (35) rather than a psychiatric case history. They
defend their non-apparitionist interpretation by arguing that such a reading provides a richer
artistic experience--i.e., the events are more horrifying and the destruction of the children more
poignant. Secondly, they derive from the story a theme of universal import concerning the hazards
of excessive sexual love--"another warning against the perils of loving not wisely but too well. . . .
She is suffering the retribution that lies in wait for all who love baselessly and excessively. . ."
(46).

Thomas rightly praises Goddard for sensitivity to literary values; however, in offering his own
interpretation of The Turn of the Screw, Thomas, it seems to me, fails sufficiently to credit
Goddard's influence. Indeed, Thomas's interpretation of The Turn of the Screw, which he presents
in the penultimate chapter of his dissertation, seems to me, in its essential outline, to be similar to
Goddard's. Thomas maintains, like Goddard, that the governess unconsciously manufactures the
supernatural threat to the children so that she can perform some heroic service for the employer,
the man she loves. He also, like Goddard, contends that she constructs this psychodrama out of the
"germ" of hint Mrs. Grose has dropped about some handsome man who liked women "young and
pretty" and about her predecessor who came to some undefined bad end.

This is not to say, however, that Thomas's interpretation does not contain original elements.
Although the essential outline of the interpretation appears to have been borrowed from Goddard,
Thomas, in developing his thesis, adds at least five original and very valuable elements of his own.

In the first place, Thomas provides a discussion of evil in the Jamesian canon as an argument for
the plausibility of a psychoanalytic approach to The Turn of the Screw. Thomas surveys the
following novels, "taken from different periods of James's creative life" (122): The American, The
Bostonians, The Portrait of a Lady, The Aspern Papers, The Tragic Muse, What Maisie Knew, The
Awkward Age, and The Ambassadors. "These novels," Thomas concludes, give no hint that the
evil James saw in the world and dealt with in his fiction was theological or supernatural or even
metaphysical. It is evil anchored squarely within, and emanating from, the human situation (122).

For example, "What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age . . . deal with children who are victims
of degenerate families involved in obsessive, adulterous intrigues." Similarly, Evil in )The
Ambassadors( is a product of prejudice, ignorance, intolerance, intrusion into the lives of others,
fear of experience, moral rigidity and the failure to have lived fully. In The Wings of the Dove and
The Golden Bowl, the atmosphere of evil is created through deception, pretense, materialism,
greed, illusion, and sentimentality (122).

This view of Jamesian evil, Thomas contends, is consistent with James's statements about fiction
in correspondence and in sources such as Hawthorne and The Art of the Novel. Thomas reminds
us that James deprecated allegory as "one of the lighter exercises of the imagination" and that, in
James's own fiction,

The actions and problems of his characters are human; they are depicted in a manner consistent
with their own strength and weaknesses, through struggle with themselves and with each other, not
with mysterious interlocutors nor with divine or malign `presences' (117).

Turning to James's ghost stories, Thomas reminds us that, of those stories which James chose to
preserve, "only six . . . including The Turn of the Screw, involve the appearance of ghosts."
Thomas surveys the five excluding The Turn of the Screw and concludes that their ghosts are not
ghosts in the traditional meaning of the term. They are not intended to convey the supernatural,
and whatever evil they represent is of decidedly human origin, that is, it is never divorced from
human relationships. James's ghost stories, insofar as they are that, are a special idiom, a dramatic
conceit, designed specifically to tell us something about the living, not the dead (125-26).

For example, in `Sir Edmund Orme,' . . . the ghost seems to represent the guilty conscience of the
woman who is harassed by its presence until her death, and until she consents to her daughter's
marriage to the man her daughter loves (123).

Likewise, `The Private Life' is not the least ghostly, nor is it intended to suggest the supernatural.
The story apparently grew out of James's interested observation that some artists are happily able
to divide their lives into two compartments for the sake of social and creative functions (123).

Similarly, in `The Friends of the Friends,' the presence of the ghosts is not only conjectural, but
these conjectures play the important part of dramatizing the narrator's jealous personality and her
manner of rejecting her fiancé (124).
We find a similar pattern in "The Real Right Thing": "There is a ghost in this story but the
emphasis is not upon ghostliness in the usual sense. Here, as in `The Aspern Papers,' James is
questioning anyone's right to invade the privacy of another's life" (125). And, finally, the specter
which Spencer Brydon encounters in `The Jolly Corner' is taken by the hero to be a representation
of what his life might have been under different circumstances. Critics agree that the specter is not
a supernatural emanation but a symbol of some potential or actual aspect of Brydon's projection of
some troubled vision of himself, one hidden from his conscious awareness, just as Peter Quint and
Miss Jessel are the symbols of the governess's unformulated desires and fears (125).

This survey of the Jamesian canon leads Thomas to conclude that Peter Quint and Miss Jessel "are
to be interpreted . . . as dramatic conceits intended to communicate some notion of the natural and
social rather than the supernatural and Christian world" (126). Upon surveying James's canon,
Thomas maintains,

One must conclude that his method of realism, his major themes, his concept of evil and the
character of his ghost stories, support more emphatically a psychological or naturalistic
interpretation of )The Turn of the Screw( than a supernatural or allegorical one. If one should insist
upon reading into the story allegorical embodiments of Calvinistic depravity, the Garden of Eden
and Original Sin, as Robert Heilman has done, one must do so in the face of the knowledge that
James presumably believed in none of these notions and certainly found no place for them in the
rest of his fiction (127-28).

Thomas further reminds us "that James's fiction previous to The Turn of the Screw frequently
concerned itself with the destructive, sometimes fatal, consequences of self-deceived females"
(128). In this connection Thomas cites not only Olive Chancellor in The Bostonians, but also Mrs.
Ambient in "The Author Beltraffio," the unidentified narrator in "The Path of Duty," and Adela
Chart in "The Marriages" (128-30).

The governess's unconsciously motivated destruction of the children is also suggested, Thomas
contends, by

two other works [which] involve the fatal victimization of children. Morgan Moreen in `The Pupil'
dies, like Miles, of heart failure. His parents' incredible negligence and their cruel use of him are
designed to further their own ambitions. The sexual theme is quite subtle though full of irony. The
relationship between Morgan and his young tutor, Pemberton, is the only positive and protective
force in the pupil's life, though it carries suggestively the seed of a morbid influence. In )The Other
House( infanticide is the consequence of Rose Armiger's blocked passion. Designing to get the
man she loves, she projects her murderous impulse onto another woman and cruelly manipulates
the lives and feelings of those around her. Finally, when her ego gives way she murders the child
who, she believes, stands between her and the fulfillment of her passion (131).

Similarly, "Maisie Farange . . . is not victimized by one but a series of unconscionable adults"
(132); and "Nana Broookenham . . . is sacrificed to her mother's monumental ego" (133).

Thomas is certainly to be commended for his thorough and insightful survey of the Jamesian
canon. While he ought, in my opinion, to credit the influence of Wilson and other psychoanalytic
critics--Edel, for example--who have viewed The Turn of the Screw within the context of the
Jamesian canon, Thomas has not simply repeated points made by Wilson or any other critic.
Though he has not discussed individual works in as much detail as did Wilson, he has considered a
greater number of works. Also, his purpose has been different from Wilson's. He has not sought to
psychoanalyze James the author, but rather to argue that a psychoanalytic interpretation of The
Turn of the Screw is consistent with broad patterns in James's fiction: realism, a non-supernatural
conception of evil, and children and others victimized by unconsciously motivated and self-
deluded persons.

If this insightful survey of the Jamesian canon is Thomas's first original contribution to The Turn
of the Screw criticism, his second is an application of Freud's essay "The Uncanny." In this essay,
Freud suggested that all people are unconsciously "under the sway of various primitive modes of
thinking," believing in the possibility of life after death, of the return of the dead, and of their
secret power to do harm to the living. When such themes are used by writers in the proper setting,
that is, where the story pretends to move in the world of common reality, the effect upon the reader
is one of the most intense that can be achieved. This is especially true if other irrational fears are
activated as well by use of, for example, silence, solitude and darkness, and suggestions of the
omnipotence of thought. Freud believed that the intense emotions aroused by silence, solitude and
darkness have their basis in the infantile past when the child was haunted by the fear of
abandonment and helplessness. Likewise, he traced the fear that one's thoughts might become
omnipotent to the time in the child's life when he used violent fantasies magically for vengeance
and for manipulating his environment. Sudden and momentary losses of consciousness, and the
existence of a `double' are two other themes whose power to evoke frightening emotions rests
upon unconscious sources. Of the former, Freud never offers a full explanation (though it is
apparently related to the fear of death), but of the `double' he gives a rather clear account. The
potentiality for the double arises out of the primary narcissism (unbounded self-love) of the child.
Its occurrence in later life involves a kind of telepathic transference of mental processes from
oneself to another. . . (135-36).

Thomas finds a "striking" number of these "uncanny situations" in The Turn of the Screw, noting,
for example, that the evil eye of death is omnipresent as two people, a valet and a governess, return
from the grave to wander about the grounds of Bly. Furthermore, it is assumed that they have some
special power through which they influence the children. This theme of the re-animated dead is
interwoven among conspicuous silences. . . . The apparitions appear during these silences and
shadows, when the governess herself seems stricken with cataleptic-life states (137).

Thomas notes also that "Peter Quint makes his first appearance at the moment the governess is
ardently wishing to encounter her employer, as though her very thoughts were omnipotent" and
that "Miss Jessel . . . may be seen as a psychological double in the sense that she represents the
governess's own projected desires and fears" (138).

Thomas with some justice accuses the psychoanalytic critics of overemphasizing the sexual
elements in the story and underemphasizing the aforementioned "uncanny" elements.

Thomas's third major contribution to The Turn of the Screw criticism is a much fuller discussion of
the tower symbolism than Wilson had provided. While admitting that the erect tower is a phallic
symbol, Thomas finds many other uses which this symbol serves. It represents, for example, "a
romantic revival of a respectable past, standing against the sky in the grandeur of its battlements."
It represents also the governess's sense of loneliness and isolation as well as her preoccupation
with death. The tower looms in the dusky twilight, and while she contemplates it she is struck by
the silence and stillness, the solitude and loneliness of the scene. The place is stricken with death
just as she is stricken with a deep chill (141).

The tower has its place also in the class conflicts with which the story is partly concerned. Its
height "suggests the uncle's distance and his exalted position in comparison to the governess."
Furthermore, "the grandeur of its battlements" suggests "the moral struggle with the ghosts for the
souls of the children, as well as her own moral struggle and her fight for sanity." Finally, the tower
"is a place where an insane person might be confined" (142)--consequently, it reminds her of Jane
Eyre and The Mystery of Udolpho.

Fourthly, Thomas has tied together Goddard's idea that the governess is constructing a
psychodrama with herself as heroine in order to impress the employer with Wilson's notion of the
sexual relationship between Quint and Jessel mirroring and symbolizing the governess's
unconsciously desired sexual relationship between herself and the employer. The governess begins
by constructing the aforementioned psychodrama, Thomas suggests, so that she can view herself as
providing some heroic service for the uncle, and then, in the implicit parallels she draws between
Quint and Miles, and Miss Jessel and Flora, and her persistently fixing upon their forbidden
activities, the governess is pushed to exasperation in her rage of sexual curiosity (146).

Finally, Thomas has added a novel twist to Goddard's suggestion that the governess unconsciously
begins to construct her psychodrama out of the hints Mrs. Grose has thrown out about some
unidentified man who liked women "young and pretty." The governess's initial delusions, Thomas
suggests, do not involve the supernatural. She first assumes that this man is still alive. After the
second vision, when Mrs. Grose tells her that Quint is dead, "she has no choice but to stick to her
story, even though it commits her to visions of the dead" (145).

In addition to critiquing the critics we have discussed and offering his own interpretation of The
Turn of the Screw, Thomas has made constructive and thoughtful suggestions for psychoanalytic
literary criticism in general and castigated psychoanalytic critics of The Turn of the Screw for not
implementing them. While his suggestions for psychoanalytic literary criticisms are sound, his
broadsides aimed at psychoanalytic critics of The Turn of the Screw are undeserved. His
conclusions are based on too small and unrepresentative a sample of criticism; furthermore,
Thomas frequently does not do justice to the critics he does discuss.

Thomas rightly urges psychoanalytic critics to consider the whole of Freud's work, not just early
specimens such as Studies in Hysteria and Hamlet, which perhaps overemphasize genital sexuality
and simplify artistic creation--sometimes even appearing to reduce it to neurotic manifestations. A
chronological survey of the Freudian canon, Thomas points out, shows that Freud moves
progressively away from a discussion of simple symptomology, such as we see in his early
analysis of )Hamlet(, to the vastly more comprehensive view of psychic functions which we see in
his interpretation of )King Lear( (44).

Freud did not look for isolated "symbols" in works of literature, says Thomas, nor treat authors and
fictional characters as case histories. Instead, his critical method consisted in rendering the
meaning of literature by tracing the psychological ambiguity of its language in mythology and
religion. Furthermore, he drew heavily upon anthropology, folklore, and legends. Freud usually
familiarized himself with the complete works of an author in order to understand his artistic
development and to know, insofar as possible, the sources of his ideas. This kind of care can be
seen, for example, in his study on the sources of Macbeth (45).

Thomas also points out that, in his essay on Lear, Freud specifically disavows an identity between
art and neurosis and cautions that "`one is hardly entitled to expect from a poet a clinically correct
description of mental illness.'" Thomas also points out "that in neither this essay on King Lear nor
in those on Macbeth and Richard III does Freud find sex to be either a primary or secondary
theme" (46). Thomas emphasizes that Freud "never said that a writer is necessarily neurotic, or that
creativity and neurosis are inextricably bound together" (62).
The above points are well taken. Thomas is unfair, however, when he says that "the promising
beginning which Freud gave to psychoanalytic literary criticism is nowhere reflected in the
interpretations of The Turn of the Screw" (47).

The suggestion to interpret individual works and parts thereof in the light of the author's entire
canon has been followed by many psychoanalytically oriented critics--of whom Wilson, Edel
Rosenzweig, Sharp, Leavis, and Aswell are a few representative examples. The overemphasis on
genital sexuality which Thomas assumes to be characteristic of all psychoanalytic criticism of this
story would come as a surprise to critics such as Cole, Spilka, Rees, and Stone--who see the story
primarily as a tale about divisions between social and economic classes--and Fraser who sees the
governess's problem as primarily theological in nature. None of the psychoanalytic critics we have
discussed in this chapter can justly be accused of reducing the governess to a psychiatric case
history--nor can others, such as Wilson, Edel, or Goddard. Thomas is wrong also to
indiscriminately accuse psychoanalytically oriented critics of reducing art to a manifestation of
neurosis. Psychiatrists Katan and Aldrich, for example, specifically disavow this notion. And
critics such as Bontly, Spilka, Rees, Fraser, and Aswell--among others--consider the governess
herself to be normal. The above critics also--with their all-pervasive interest in the relationships
among the characters--do not "[dismiss] the critical task by removing the governess from the total
setting and from the context of characters" (32).

Furthermore, authorial critics such as Wilson and Aswell, who find universally applicable
meanings and profound social criticism in the story, can hardly be justly accused of "[reducing]
literature to its unconscious origins" (154). Critics such as Lydenberg and Fraser, who have fused
psychoanalytic and theological approaches, can hardly be accused of ignoring the non-
psychoanalytic intellectual disciplines which Thomas urges be acknowledged.

Let us recapitulate. Thomas's interpretation of The Turn of the Screw contains original and
valuable elements--he should, however, in presenting this interpretation, have acknowledged a
debt to critics such as Goddard and Wilson. He is right to reject a simplistic psychoanalytic
approach which equates art with neurosis, reducing the literary product to its psychological origins,
and treats fictional characters as if they were psychiatric case histories. In so doing, however, he is
"preaching to the converted," if we may be permitted to "turn the screw" with a cliche. His
recommendations are well taken, but they have been taken by critics both without and within his
unrepresentative and unfairly castigated sampling.

Chapter VI: Culminations 1970 – 1979

1. Criticism Elucidating Psychological and/or Philosophical Themes

in the Work
a. Holloway

Sr. Marcella M. Holloway, C.S.J. further developed Collins's, Rubin's, and Trachtenberg's
exposures of the striking similarities between Douglas and Miles and consequent suggestions that
Douglas and Miles are the same person. Holloway weaves these striking similarities into a new
and highly original interpretation of the story.
While Trachtenberg had seen the story as a near-death confession from Douglas, Holloway read
the narrative as a pre-mortem confession from the governess to Douglas. Although Holloway
accepts as factual the meeting between the twenty-year-old Douglas and the thirty-year-old
governess which is narrated in the prologue, she suggests that the events at Bly may never have
taken place. Instead, she suggests that the governess's narrative may be "a kind of allegory sent
from the borderland of death to a man she loved" (10).

Holloway reminds us of the love between Douglas and the governess which neither "spoke of" at
the time and recalls that neither ever married. The story--which reveals her unrequited love for the
employer and for Miles, both of whom resemble Douglas--is "the story of a man and woman who
let love pass them by, repressed it" (12). The story is thus a confession of the governess's love for
Douglas. It is also, however,--since Douglas reads the story to the interlocutors around the fire--
Douglas's own story. It is "a dreadful allegory . . . the story of Douglas, of the Governess, of James
himself, and ultimately of the readers who share in the terrors of suppressed love" (14).

The moral, however, is not that Douglas and the governess should have married. For the
governess's love--because of her repressed and misunderstood sexuality--would have been
neurotic, possessive, and destructive even in marriage. This is the governess's complementary
purpose:

. . . to make manifest in her confession her sexual neurosis, to warn Douglas that she would have
been no good for him after all. She would have smothered him with her neurotic love, killed him
utterly, and he would have found her out and called her as Miles does in her story, `a devil' (14).

Holloway's reading is even more plausible because she relates her psychoanalysis of these fictional
characters to telling insights regarding "James' own personal problems" (16-17) as reflected in his
canon--Holloway suggests that "the governess is a heroine antithetically akin to James' May
Bartram in `The Beast in the Jungle'" (14)--and to "the tone of James' own Notebooks written
during the period which followed the fictional and dramatic crises of his middle career" (17).
Holloway does not offer a detailed discussion of James's psychology or psychosexual history--she
does, however, allude to the work of Cranfill and Clark, Shine, and others.

Her focus remains literary. She is careful to relate her psychological and philosophical insights to
the story's effect on the reader:

The story . . . has had such wide appeal not because it reflects James's own personal problems but
because he has touched upon a fundamental truth of human existence: `Virtue and vice coexist in
each of us.' This is a truth of human nature which must be assimilated before the claim to maturity
can be made. The Governess from her deathbed dared to be honest. If fiction is truer than life, her
little fiction still haunts us all because of an unpleasant truth. Confessions are never of pleasant
truths (17).

b. Nardin: Holloway With a Marxist Twist

Jane Nardin also reads the story as an indictment of repressed and unrequited love. However, while
Holloway seems to see the root of the problem in individual pathology--the "neurosis" of the
governess and/or Douglas--Nardin sees unrequited and repressed love as the natural consequence
of

the cruel and destructive pressures of Victorian society, with its restrictive code of sexual morality
and its strong sense of class consciousness. . . . Because the adult characters in The Turn of the
Screw are trying to live by a set of social and moral norms that deny or frustrate some of the basic
impulses of human nature, their good intentions turn sour and they begin to show marked signs of
strain and mental deterioration. As Miles and Flora receive their education in this set of false
values, their innocence is gradually corrupted (132).

Sexual repression is rampant in The Turn, suggests Nardin, because "Victorian standards defining
socially proper marriages are so narrow that the necessity of following them frequently frustrates
the desire for love, with unwholesome results" (132). Sexual repression, however, is part of a
broader pattern. Miles and Flora's love for their surrogate parents, Quint and Jessel, must also be
repressed because the latter are the children's social inferiors.

Unlike Holloway, Nardin assumes that the governess's narrative is largely factual. Like Holloway,
however, she sees the Douglas of the prologue as a "wistful bachelor brooding over his lost love
forty years after the event." She sees the repressed love between the governess and Douglas as a
mirror image of the repressions which occurred at Bly.

If so, this vignette of frustrated love in the realistic frame narrative serves to reinforce the impact
of the frustrated love theme within the gothic tale itself, to suggest that throughout ordinary
Victorian society there are people who carry through life the scars of love which society forbids
(133).

Nardin accepts Goddard's explanation of the subconscious motivation for the governess's
hallucinations.

The governess is well aware that the master sees her only as a servant. If she brings herself or her
problems with the children to his attention, he will be displeased with her. In devising her demonic
solution of the Bly mysteries the governess is partly motivated by her desire to be involved in a
situation which will bring her to the master's attention without costing her his approval. Such a
situation could only be the existence of a serious problem in the upbringing of Miles and Flora
which she solves without appealing to her employer. Later he will somehow hear about it and will
be delighted with the concern for his peace of mind which she has demonstrated. When she is
actually confronted by a peculiar situation at Bly, the governess therefore has an emotional interest
in magnifying its significance (140).

The governess is driven to these extremities, of course, because the caste system of Victorian
Britain would not permit the employer to think of her as a romantic partner and because the
economic realities of Victorian Britain have forced her to accept employment in an isolated and
unpromising location.

Moreover, the "peculiar situation at Bly" which furnishes the material for her psychodrama exists
largely because of the aforementioned caste system and the repressions it engenders. The "peculiar
situation" includes not only the hallucinations of the repressed governess, but also the unnatural
silence of the children concerning Quint and Jessel and the bad report which Mrs. Grose provides
concerning the two deceased servants. Nardin explains these facts by postulating romantic love
between Quint and Jessel and a close relationship between the two servants and the children.
Nardin reminds us that Mrs. Grose gives us little if any particulars about the wickedness of Quint
and Jessel, that Miles was expelled from school for "saying things," and that the children--although
they are silent about Quint and Jessel--seem, until the very end, free of objectionable behavior.
Nardin suggests that the "socially unworkable" attraction between Quint and Jessel would have
seemed "horrifying" to the conventional mind of Mrs. Grose.

A governess may not fully qualify as a lady when marriage to her employer's son is at issue, but
she is certainly too much of a lady to marry a valet. . . . In the Victorian era it was considered
infinitely more shocking for a lady to wish to marry beneath her than for a gentleman to do so.
Why would a lady want to break so sacred a social taboo as that prohibiting intermarriage between
classes if a strong sexual attraction were not at least part of her motive? Her motive for marrying a
working class man could not be social advancement, nor was it likely to be a personal affection--
for how could she feel true affection for a man whose manners and education were so inferior to
her own? By merely wishing to marry beneath her a lady proved that she lacked the innocence and
purity of mind which Victorian mores expected of her. For Miss Jessel to express an intention to
marry Quint would have been seen as proof of depravity. She would have lost her place and Quint
might have lost his. Such a marriage was socially unthinkable. If Quint and Miss Jessel were truly
in love, their position was a pitiable one (133).

Similarly, Mrs. Grose, who "liked to see young gentlemen not forget their station" (Turn 213)
would have been upset by a close relationship between Quint and Miles. She might also have been
jealous of the love between Quint and Miss Jessel and of the pair's closeness to the children. Mrs.
Grose's prejudices, moreover, would have been shared by others in Victorian Britain--particularly,
the authorities at Miles's school. In order to be expelled, suggests Nardin, Miles must have violated
an important social norm--so important that the school authorities decided to make an example of
him. Though it is impossible to be sure exactly what Miles said, there is evidence to suggest that it
had something to do with Quint and Miss Jessel's relationships with each other and with him. . . . If
the orphaned Miles was really as close to Quint and Miss Jessel as Mrs. Grose suggests, it is
natural that he should miss them and should be thinking about them on his return to school. But he
already senses that he must not be too open about his relationship with them, for Mrs. Grose has
accused him of `forgetting his station . . .' and has expressed her shocked disapproval of Quint's
relationship with Miss Jessel. So Miles cautiously decides to speak of these lost friends only in
secret, to `those he likes' (136).

Such speech would have resulted in extreme punishment:

To treat . . . basic Victorian social and sexual taboos so cavalierly, to corrupt other boys by
imparting these immoral attitudes in secret, would call for drastic exemplary punishment . . . in
secretly voicing egalitarian sentiments about Quint and Miss Jessel, Miles would have been
striking at his school's raison d'etre: the preparation of status conscious gentlemen to fill their
places in a stratified society (138).

Such a drastic punishment, moreover, would explain the subsequent silence of Miles and Flora.

Like Spilka, Nardin contends that, although the ghosts are hallucinations, the governess is a normal
product of her culture.

. . . the fact that she has hallucinations does not prove that she is hysterical, insane, neurotic, or
irrational. . . . The ghosts are the logical offspring of the governess' attempts to understand a
complex human situation in terms of a cultural tradition incapable of yielding real insight (139).

She is influenced not only by the economic realities of her situation but also by her religious
background, which Nardin suggests is probably "the Evangelical group within the Church of
England." Particularly important is the view of human nature and morality which she has received
from her religious training. The governess' view of moral issues tends to run to extremes; for her,
people are either good or evil (139).

The normality of the governess is readily apparent, says Nardin, when she is seen in the context of
English literary history.

In her love-at-first-sight response to her master, the governess spontaneously recreates a standard
situation in the English novel, dating at least as far back as Pamela: a middle-class girl finds an
upper-class man immensely attractive, primarily because the lifelong possession of rank and
money have given him style and an air of freedom. That Douglas sees the governess' infatuation
for the master within this literary tradition is apparent from his reference to the master as `a
figure . . . in . . . an old novel. . . .' It is to novels like Pamela and Clarissa . . . that we must look. . .
(141).

Nardin's highly original synthesis of Freudian and Marxist insights has indeed, "by suggesting
society as the demon of the piece, [located] another source of the pervasive, uneasy sense of
corruption in The Turn of the Screw" (132). Her sociological approach offers a convincing way to
interpret the highly ambiguous The Turn of the Screw as a tale which is neither about evil
metaphysically conceived, nor about madness clinically conceived, but rather as a story of a
particular social milieu and the way it affects people living in it (142).

c. Cole

Robert Carlton Cole, like Spilka, combines Marxist and Freudian insights by suggesting that the
governess's hallucinations spring from hysteria caused by her repression of her awareness that
social inequities will frustrate her love for her employer. Emphasis on that awareness as the cause
of her hysteria sets this study apart from those--the majority of the psychological interpretations--
that assume that her hysteria derives primarily from the repression of sexual love. The governess is
not suppressing erotic feeling, but despair at being too low in the social hierarchy to hope for the
master's attention (1-2).

Cole suggests that her desire to marry the employer is primarily a desire to become mistress of
Bly. Following Wilson, Cole contends that the illicit relationship between Quint and Jessel
corresponds to the relationship she desires between the master and herself. Cole adds, however, an
original insight concerning the respective social positions of Quint and Jessel and the resulting
Freudian "antagonistic inversion" which they represent:

In her projections, the two ghosts become the opposite of her concept of the two people who
concern her most, herself and the master--Freud's `antagonistic inversion.' The master, socially
unattainable, becomes in her projections his servant, Peter Quint, who would be her social inferior
in `the scale'...which is so important to the governess (7-8).

Cole's argument consists mainly of close attention to the text's portrayal of the governess's
symptoms of "hysteria"--"the linear progress of the governess' emotional instability...is so distinct
that it could be plotted on the 'vital signs sheet' of a hospital patient proceeding irregularly through
a series of peaks and depressions" (4-5), as well as her many statements betraying a preoccupation
and dissatisfaction with her place in the Victorian caste system. He suggests also that Mrs. Grose is
exercised over Quint and Jessel not knowing their "place" in the social hierarchy rather than over
specifically sexual infractions and provides evidence that the governess and the housekeeper
frequently misunderstand one another because of their different preoccupations and the latter's
limited vocabulary. For example, Mrs. Grose may mean Quint was too "free" in disregarding caste
distinctions, but the governess may interpret "free" as sexually unrestrained. Similarly, Mrs. Grose
may agree that Quint and Jessel were "infamous" and that Flora's bad language "justifies" the
governess without knowing what the words "infamous" and "justifies" mean. Cole also contends
quite plausibly that Mrs. Grose--because of her precarious economic situation and consequent need
of employment at Bly--is afraid to cross the governess even when she is distressed at the latter's
destructive effects on the children.

Cole's dissertation is a cogent argument which convincingly synthesizes Freudian and Marxist
approaches.

d. Mogen: A Less Marxist Spilka

As Nardin is a more Marxist variant of Holloway, so David Mogen is a less Marxist variant of
Spilka. Like Spilka, Mogen reads the story as a parable in which the reader is expected to accept
the existence of the ghosts and considers the ghosts to be representatives of erotic realities which
Victorian society has repressed. His analysis, however, differs from Spilka's in two important
respects: first, Mogen does not provide a detailed explanation of how this repression is grounded in
conflicts of interest between different economic classes, although he does compare this repression
to "a luxurious cell where...awareness struggling for release is confined for the convenience of
others" (235); secondly, Mogen seems explicitly to disavow the desirability of social protest--
instead, "the challenge which confronts [the governess], which she is not equipped to meet
successfully, is to accept the presence of the ghosts without forcing the children to confront them
publicly" (235). Thus, just as Holloway sees the source of the problem in individual neurosis, so
Mogen sees the solution in an individual and private acceptance of realities which society need
never acknowledge.

Indeed, the governess's public acknowledgement is destructive, according to Mogen. It is this

public flouting of conventions which causes the governess to fail where Maggie Verver had
succeeded. Unlike Maggie Verver, who in her wisdom "neither denies the truth, nor breaks down
the forms that protect her culture from confronting it directly" (233), the governess, with no
strategy for survival...breaks down all the forms of civility by which her culture avoids confronting
its duplicity. She forces a confrontation between the children's pose of innocence and their furtive
acquaintance with eroticism and nightmare, and the result is insanity and death....Her mistake is to
assume that the forms can be dispensed with--and the result is psychic and social disintegration
(233).

Here Mogen is reminiscent of critics such as Lydenberg who have argued that the governess
aggravates otherwise quiescent evils.

She becomes the embodiment of the horrors she wrests from the children, but she threatens their
security more traumatically than the ghosts did, since she leaves them nowhere to hide. By
entering into open battle with the bad-faced strangers, the governess only shatters the precarious
defenses of her kingdom and delivers it into their power (233).

Interestingly, and perhaps inconsistently, Mogen holds that these social forms are important
precisely because of the unhealthy and all-pervasive repression which, in his view, ought not to be
publicly challenged. "Where hysteria threatens constantly to disrupt the placid surface, maintaining
the forms becomes more than a matter of style. It is a necessity of survival" (232-233).

Mogen's view of the governess's unconscious motivations for her hallucinations is similar to the
view propounded in Wilson's 1938 essay. Mogen goes beyond Wilson, however, in imputing also
to the children the eroticism which the specters represent.

If the apparitions embody the children's most hidden and guilty experience, they also represent a
debased and frightening parody of the governess' own fantasies--their erotic relationship parodies
her romantic attraction to the children's bachelor uncle, and Miss Jessel's pale disgrace confronts
her with her own most intolerable desires and anxieties (233).

Although he does not discuss James's psychology extensively, Mogen seems to accept Edel's view
of The Turn of the Screw as the product of a psychological crisis from which James subsequently
recovered. He sees in The Golden Bowl a resolution of problems unresolved in The Turn of the
Screw. Maggie Verver, unlike the governess,

finally...sees the `forms' in perspective: they are instruments to be employed for the purposes of a
conscious and all-embracing love, which can be ignored without fear or regret when they have no
utility (240).

Accordingly, in The Golden Bowl the hysteria of James's Victorian girl is transformed from a
helplessly destructive obsession to the source of a regenerative power of love. The cracked bowl,
unlike the desolated garden at Bly, is finally an emblem of new life, the shattered husk of a
growing thing (241).

Of course, the solution which Maggie Verver finds--and which Mogen appears to commend--is a
private solution to an unacknowledged social problem, whose basis in economic conflicts between
classes Mogen does not discuss. Might we classify Mogen's reading as "bourgeois Spilkaism"?

e. Grunes: Synthesis of Freudian and Mythic Criticism

Dennis Grunes combines psychoanalytic and mythic criticism in an interpretation which locates
the origin of the governess's hallucinations and delusions in her unresolved oedipal problems and
then demonstrates how--as she interprets the events in light of her Calvinist background--she
weaves a "parody of Christian myth" (230) in which "Christ's redemption of us has been confused
with the Fall from which we are redeemed" (231).

Grunes suggests that the governess has been driven from her country home to London and from
there to Bly because of the threat of "incestuous love" between herself and her father--"whether
this is the result of longings of her own, his advances, or both" (228). This explains the "disturbing
letters" she receives from "home where things are not going well." She comes to Bly tormented by
guilt and fear concerning her incestuous cravings and pity and remorse because of "what she has
done (leaving home and father) and terribly lonely over where she is" (228). She cannot love a
man--the employer or any other--in a healthy way or care for children in a wholesome way, "since
now for her love and incest are dangerously confused" (229). Her fears are exacerbated by the
overvaluing of parental authority which has been so much a part of her strict Evangelical
upbringing: "...to have gone out on her own, as she has done, is to have gone the devil's way"
(229).

Because of her incestuous cravings which taint any sexual attraction, her loneliness, guilt, and
sexual frustration, and her infatuation for the employer--her repressed sexual fantasies take the
form of a demonic and sexualized counterpart of the uncle, who is also her father. She later sees
Jessel as a counterpart to herself in sexual union with the male specter.

Quint's ghost looms as an unshakable infernal image of the governess's own father, the Christian
name giving him away (from the Latin pater meaning father, recalling Saint Peter, father of the
Church) (228).

The governess then projects these fantasies onto the children and seeks to "save" them as a way of
saving herself.

That she unconsciously interprets the carnally connected ghosts as herself and her father suggests--
besides a traumatic reason for having left home--what the governess ultimately fears regarding her
charges. In other words, she projects onto the children her own sexual obsession, imagining all the
while that they are being encouraged by the ghosts of those who had been their demonstrative
private tutors in forbidden love. The siblings' affection for one another becomes a horror for her
(as when Miles puts his arm around his sister `to keep her quite in touch'), much as her father--as
Quint--looks like the very devil (with hair and beard the flaming color of carnality) because he
now, for her, embodies incestuous love... (228).

Her desire to "save" the children, according to Grunes, is a desire not only to escape from her own
incestuous cravings and the threat of their fulfillment, but also to reconcile herself to the father
whom she pities and regrets leaving.

Whatever else it may be, her ambition to `save' the children is an attempt to fulfill her father's
ministerial role, thereby reconciling preacher and daughter as pure ministers of God. She will risk
all--herself as well as her charges--to obliterate an evil past in the hope of salvaging a future of
innocence regained (230).

As she attempts to save the children, however, her ministerial efforts become a "parody of
Christian myth" (230). For the governess herself, the would be savior, is the one in need of
salvation. "...the children are the ones--especially Miles...who must save her" (230) by becoming
victims of her obsessions and delusions. His death, suggests Grunes, may purge the girl of the
obsession Miles had embodied, especially if she believes she has saved his soul. Freedom from the
dread that had driven her from her father might explain how this hysterical woman became for
Douglas, who reads us her manuscript, 'the most agreeable' governess he has ever known (230).

We have here, of course, a clear parody of the Christian myth. In contrast to Christ, who is "a
victim, but an ultimate one...whose suffering, part of a required master plan, is rewarded by the
paternal God" and who "achieves the power of true divinity through his suffering," this unfortunate
little boy "exists without such power to make his victimization and suffering meaningful....his
innocence certifies only his impotence and proves his downfall, not his triumph" (231). In other
words, Miles is simply a victimized little boy whose grotesque function is to save a fanatic from
the evil in her own mind that makes him seem evil to her. In this parody of Christian myth, Miles,
unconscious of his redemptive mission, must confirm his innocence by confessing to an esoteric
sin (230-231).

Grunes reminds us of many other children in Victorian literature who function as ironic Christ
figures--for example, "Oliver Twist, an innocent who has no ability to redeem Bill Sykes, the
sinful surrogate for us all" and Little Nell of The Old Curiosity Shop, "a failed Christ whose
forgiveness her grandfather begs in a Christian reversal of age and youth" (231).

Grunes suggests that readers respond to such stories because they see in children their own lost
innocence. "The transformation of the traditionally innocent child into a demon" allows us to
transfer our incestuous and other forbidden impulses to something outside of ourselves and our
experience. There is more here than projection. Children such as Miles and Flora, and Regan in
The Exorcist, are not considered real people subject to blame. Human conflicts--for example,
between parents and children--are explained away. Our children would be in perfect harmony with
us, and we would be at peace with ourselves, were malicious supernatural beings not attacking
from without.

It is not the fault of parents, Blatty's book assures us, that children rebel so; it is simply that Satan
has gotten hold of them. Happily, this exonerates the young as well. They are helpless victims, still
entitled to parental love (222).

Grunes's interpretation is an insightful combination of psychoanalytic and mythic criticism--

showing how the psychological history of a disturbed woman becomes a parody of Christian
theology. In the process Grunes provides thought provoking speculations as to reader responses to
The Turn of the Screw , as well other Victorian and modern works.

f. Briggs: Freudian and Theological Criticism Intertwined

Because Julia Briggs finds in the story insoluble ambiguity deliberately engendered to augment the
reader's experience of terror and because she offers insights as to how this ambiguity is effected,
her criticism will also be discussed in the section of this chapter dealing with structuralist criticism.
Here we will comment on an interpretation which she considers plausible, although not necessarily
exclusively correct. This interpretation synthesizes psychoanalytic and theological approaches in a
manner strikingly reminiscent of Lydenberg.

Briggs assumes that the ghosts are real supernatural entities which threaten the children, basing
this observation not on detailed argumentation, but on the observation that "James's starting-point,"
according to the Notebooks, the Prefaces, and much of his correspondence, "was a story of two
dead servants tempting two living children" (154). However, while the danger to the children may
be real, the governess's unrequited passion for the employer soon seduces her into "projecting her
personal fantasies upon the situation" (156).

Briggs's interpretation of these "personal fantasies" seems to combine Wilson's and Goddard's
insights. Briggs points out that, in the governess's descriptions, the three main male characters and
the three female characters seem to merge, or assume aspects of one another's personalities...
[suggesting] psychic impositions rather than real relationships (156).

Thus, Briggs agrees with Wilson that the sexual relationship between Quint and Jessel mirrors the
governess's longed for relationship with the master and agrees with Goddard that her desire to
sacrifice herself heroically for the master is an unconscious substitution for a sexual relationship
with this man. Briggs's insight into the "merging" of these characters, however, allows her to
explain the erotic attraction to Miles more coherently than either Goddard or Wilson had done. The
fervent desire to "save" Miles is a desire for sex with Miles, who, for her, is equivalent to Quint
and the employer.

Briggs combines psychology and theology in her suggestion that the aforementioned "strong
motives of self-interest" lead the governess into the sin of "hubris," which in turn causes her to
conduct an incorrect and ineffective exorcism and thus become a failed Pelagian savior.
...there is something akin to hubris in her assumption that she can exorcise the demon in Miles
unaided, without `bell, book, and candle', without holy water or holy church....As the daughter of a
clergyman she should surely have known better. Miles's death has an accidental air, as if he were
caught between conflicting powers beyond her control, the helpless victim of a well-meaning
amateur (155).

Briggs has offered an original and coherent interpretation which effectively synthesizes
psychological and theological approaches. Interestingly, her view of the governess as an
unsuccessful Pelagian savior and of Miles as the victim of an incorrect exorcism is shared by
Voegelin (to be discussed shortly). Briggs, although similar to Lydenberg in combining
psychology and theology in an approach unsympathetic to the governess, differs from the former
critic in reading the story primarily as an indictment of Pelagianism rather than Puritanism and in
holding that the governess sins in improperly confronting manifest evils rather than in bringing to
actuality otherwise dormant evils.

g. Fryer: Mythic Criticism with a Feminist Twist

Judith Fryer sees in the governess--and, to a lesser extent, in Mrs. Grose--examples of the Great
Mother, one of several female archetypal figures or "faces of Eve" appearing recurrently in
American literature during the latter two thirds of the nineteenth century. Other "faces" include the
Temptress, the American Princess, and the New Woman. Examples of the Temptress are
Hawthorne's Hester Prynne, Miriam, and Beatrice--as well as Melville's Isabel and Holmes's Elsie
Venner. The American Princess is a variant of the pale maiden....a descendant of the sentimental
heroine, whose story nineteenth century ladies read over and over, but...something more....she has
indigenous qualities that distinguish her from the sentimental heroine, regal qualities that will
eventually take her to Europe in search of old worlds to conquer....a unique combination of
innocence and self-reliance (85-86).

However, "her self-reliance is more theoretical than actual....she is never threatening to men. A
descendant of the sentimental heroine, her project is to get her man" (25). Examples are "the
ethereal Lucy in Melville's Pierre...Hawthorne's Priscilla and Hilda, James's Daisy Miler, Milly
Theale, and Maggie Verver...Isabel Archer" (86). The New Woman seeks "the place for the
woman who swerves from the path laid down for her by tradition" (208). The following are some
examples: Hawthorne's Zenobia; James's Olive Chancellor, Miss Birdseye, Mrs. Farrinder, and Dr.
Prance; Howells's Dr. Breen and Eveleth Strange; and Kate Chopin's Edna Pontellier. The Great
Mother, in the words of Erich Neumann, "in her function of fixation and not releasing what aspires
toward independence and freedom is dangerous" (qtd. in Fryer 143). One type of Great Mother is
the mother surrogate typified by Olive Chancellor, of which type the governess and Mrs. Grose are
specimens:

Her characteristics--a desperate determination to possess and control coupled with an equally
desperate fear of a loss of control, a strength born of belief in the rightness of her cause which
amounts to a religious zeal, martyrdom--are those of the mother surrogates who haunt, or
dominate, James's novels. The Governess, Mrs. Grose, Mrs. Bread, Mrs. Wix are all 'mother
surrogates' who possess such qualities in varying degrees (152).

Two other types can be identified: the `neglecters'...those actual mothers who are devoid of any
maternal feeings: Mrs. Farange, Mrs. Moreen, and Mrs. Touchett....and finally...the real witch-
bitches: Rose Armiger, Madame de Bellegarde and Madame Merle, who deliberately set out to
destroy their victims (152).

All of these "Eves" are negative portrayals--or at least seriously incomplete in some way. This is
true even of the New Woman portrayals. Zenobia, for example, commits suicide, while Miss
Birdseye is "a ridiculous and pathetic caricature" (226) of a social reformer and Dr. Prance is
"prancing around in a circle, going nowhere....with an absence of sexuality" (232).

These negative Eves are, moreover, according to Fryer, offshoots of "the myth of America as New
World Garden of Eden,...the dominant myth of American culture" (vii). Accordingly, Fryer sees in
this pattern of negative representations the anima images of male authors "who projected their own
images upon their heroines" (x). They were led to do this, Fryer maintains, because of the
industrial revolution, which led to the increased migration of women to cities where employment
opportunities existed outside the home. "With the potential of economic independence open to her,
not only was the basis of her subordination diminished , but the stability of the family was
challenged as well" (10). Accordingly, this negative reaction occurred:

If Eve was the cause of the original Adam's downfall, the role of the New World Eve must be
minimized. This time she must be kept in her place so that in the American version of the myth
there will be no Fall (6).

Fryer's location of the governess and Mrs. Grose within the gallery of Great Mothers is based on a
careful reading of the text.

The governess, Fryer points out, sees her own psychic projections, not real people. Thus, she sees
things only in terms of black and white; thus the children are beautiful and innocent at the
beginning of the tale and ugly and evil at its conclusion. They are never just children--a mixture of
good and bad, mischievous and angelic, serious and frivolous--as children often are (157).

Fryer lists a number of telling examples of the governess's dubious perceptions--pointing out, for
example, the unlikelihood that Miles "had never for a second suffered" and "had--morally at any
rate--nothing to whack" in view of his orphaned status and his dismissal from school. Her capacity
for self-deception, Fryer suggests, has led her unconsciously to construct a psychodrama in which
"she has imagined a role for herself in which she will provide the direction for the lost passengers,
thus earning for herself the admiration of the master in Harley Street" (155-156). This leads to the
destruction of the children--"Flora is driven mad and Miles is literally frightened to death";
consequently, whether or not the ghosts are `real' is not important....What is important is the
governess....The story is about her....the evil done to the children...is done by the governess and far
outweighs any potential evil effected through the machinations of any ghosts, real or imagined.
The governess destroys the children by attempting to possess them (153).

Fryer lists many convincing examples of such possessiveness. She points out how the governess
immediately moves Flora into her bedroom, keeps Miles out of school, and intercepts the
children's letters to their guardian. Fryer notes also the revealing language the governess frequently
applies to herself--for example, "I was like a gaolor with an eye to possible surprises and escapes"
(159). In a telling discussion of the all-pervasive "threat of possession in a sexual sense" which is
always "underlying the governess's overprotection of the boy" (159), Fryer points out how, in the
last scene, the governess compares herself and Miles to a honeymooning married couple.
Furthermore, Fryer points out "an...association of this kind of love with death, foreshadowing just
what possession will mean for Miles" when their Sunday morning trip to church ends in the
graveyard.
The governess, in fact, sinks down on a stone slab when Miles first inquires whether his uncle
knows what is going on at Bly and then rebelliously marches into the church, leaving the
governess alone on her tomb.

This same possessive love, moreover, is associated with sickness...she even begins to listen outside
his closed bedroom door. When he catches her there and refers to `this queer business of ours,' she
sees him as `some wistful patient in a children's hospital,' like a convalescent slightly fatigued who
needs mothering.

What follows is a series of kisses "that makes Miles look `as...sick children look,' makes him face
the wall and beg her to let him alone" (159-160).

This possessiveness, Fryer suggests, is related to a quest for total knowledge of another person
which, in nineteenth-century American literature, is frequently destructive.

One is reminded of Hawthorne, and beyond him of Poe: the governess loses the struggle for
possession of the children (they are lost even if their souls are saved) because she attempts to know
too much. In the Poe-Hawthorne-James tradition, knowledge is equated with evil, possession with
destruction; to know, to possess is to destroy. One has only to think of `Rappaccini's Daughter,'
`The Birthmark,' `Ethan Brand,' or `Young Goodman Brown' to understand that superhuman
knowledge or the quest for perfection leads only to destruction. Possession by intellectual
knowledge (or in this case, supernatural knowledge) is opposed to the more subtle and intuitive
knowledge of the heart. To possess one's lover by complete knowledge inevitably leads to the
destruction of the loved one--in this case the destruction of the children by the passionate
devouring of the governess (161-162).

Mrs. Grose also, according to Fryer, should be seen as a "Jamesian mother-figure, potentially
destructive in her capacity for possessiveness" (163). Fryer praises Dr. Aldrich for suggesting that
Mrs. Grose is jealous of the governess's authority over the children and consequently may be
encouraging her fantasies in order to drive her mad. Fryer also, like Aldrich, reminds us that most
of our information about Quint and Jessel comes from Mrs. Grose, who may be a prejudiced
observer jealous of Quint's interest in Miss Jessel. Fryer also reminds us of Mrs. Groses's strange
statement that the employer "didn't really in the least know" Quint and Jessel, which seems to
contradict her earlier assertion "that Quint was the master's personal valet and that the master put
Quint in complete charge when Miss Jessel had to leave." Furthermore, suggests Fryer, her failure
to report their misdeeds to the employer is a puzzling admission on Mrs. Grose's part. It seems to
reveal that she was content to ignore the 'infamy' of Quint and Miss Jessel (presumably their open
and intimate sexual relationship) so that she could have complete control of the children (165).

Fryer has, in an original and interesting way, combined mythic and theological criticism with a
psychoanalysis of the fictional characters and their author synthesized with sociological insights
grounded in a feminist analysis of nineteenth century American culture. Her assertion that the
negative Eves are male projections, however, is difficult to accept completely. Fryer's own analysis
seems to suggest that the figures were, at least in part, accurate representations of reality. For
example, terming "pure fantasy" James's extraordinary praise of his mother, Fryer says,

The younger brothers and sister were in fact crushed by the irrationalities and contradictions of the
familial environment over which Mary James presided, and the novelist, while he surmounted
them, was to re-create in his fiction these very contradictions (148).

She suggests also that governesses and tutors--Mrs. Wix and Pemberton, for example--were
strongly inclined toward such possessiveness because of their precarious economic situation.
Upper class women such as Madam Merle, on the other hand, derived some of their power
precisely from that leisure--unemployment--which feminists so deplore.

James perceived `an abyss of inequality' in America, `the like of which has never before been seen
under the sun.' This inequality lay in `the growing divorce between the American woman (with her
comparative leisure, culture, grace, social instincts, artistic ambitions) and the male American
immersed in the ferocity of business, with no time for any but the most sordid interests, purely
commercial, professional democratic and political.' Women in James's America have all the power,
and in his fiction they are often strong and terrifying women--especially in their ability to
manipulate others (149).

h. Mythic Criticism Leading to a Devaluation of the Novella and an Indictment of Twentieth

Century Consciousness: Voegelin

In November of 1947 philosopher Eric Voegelin wrote a letter to Robert B. Heilman responding to
the as yet unpublished manuscript of Heilman's famous 1948 article, "The Turn of the Screw as
Poem." In this letter Voegelin praised Heilman for his theological approach and offered his own
interpretation of the novella, reading the story as an indictment of Pelagianism. In January of 1970
Voegelin wrote an essay in which he adhered to the basic interpretation he had hitherto expounded
but claimed that the novella was only partially successful in expressing its theme because the
mythic elements did not adhere in a completely coherent pattern. Voegelin asserted that this type
of effect is endemic in twentieth-century literature and traceable to a "deformation of
consciousness" existing in the West since the Renaissance. Because both essays were published for
the first time in the winter of 1971--in an issue of Southern Review devoted exclusively to studies
of Voegelin and his philosophy--and because Voegelin intended the two essays to be read as a unit,
both are discussed in this chapter, which deals with criticism in the 1970's.

In his letter to Heilman Voegelin contends that the employer, the governess, and the
housekeeper....symbolize, in this order, God, the soul, and the earthy, commonsense existence. The
soul is released by God to enter on its struggle with forces of good and evil (children and
apparitions). This release has the form of an employment, and of its acceptance, on very interesting
conditions (10).

These "interesting conditions," Voegelin reminds us, are `that she should never trouble him--but
never, never: neither appeal nor complain nor write about anything: only meet all questions
herself, receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over, and let him alone.' The
soul is on her own, burdened with the full responsibility for its problems, equipped with nothing
but a living body (money from the solicitor) (11).

This foolish "assumption of full responsibility, without recourse to communication (prayers for
help) and consequently without help (grace)"--an assumption which other applicants have wisely
refused to accept--leads to "a horrible defeat." Thus, Voegelin interprets the novella as "a study of
the demonically closed soul...possessed by the pride of handling the problem of good and evil by
its own means" (11). In this preoccupation James was a man of his time, for "the problem of `self-
salvation' through the demonically closed human will...plagued everybody in the nineteenth
century, particularly Nietzsche" (24).

Voegelin, with this interpretation, illuminates many elements in the plot of the novella.
For example, commenting on the governess's interception of the children's letters to the employer,
Voegelin quotes the governess's admission that, in so doing, she `carried out the spirit of the
pledge given not to appeal to him.' The legalistic formulation of the `spirit of the pledge' shows
that the anima is up to tricks. The letter of the pledge had only said that she, the governess, should
not appeal to the employer; the interpretation of the spirit, that the children should not write, is her
own. The employer had only enjoined the governing conscience, the responsible ego, not to appeal
to him; he had not enjoined that no appeal should rise to him from the depth of the soul, overriding
freedom, conscience, and ego. The `spirit' of non-communication, and of the repression of the
desire for communication, is not the spirit of the employer; it is the spirit of the governess (13).

Voegelin, like many other critics, sees the confrontation with Miles on the way to church as a
climactic point. He--like Fryer and Briggs, among others--notes her sitting on a tombstone before
returning to Bly and encountering Miss Jessel in the schoolroom. Voegelin suggests that the
governess commits spiritual suicide by her definitive refusal to contact the employer, which she
terms a refusal to "sacrifice" him. The employer must be sacrificed, and this sacrifice must be
accepted if the soul is to live. Thus, she rises from the tombstone spiritually dead and from then on
becomes more and more like Miss Jessel. The identification is complete when, at the final
appearance of Miss Jessel, Flora, when commanded to look at the apparition, instead looks at her
present governess with "reprobation."

Voegelin reminds us that Quint first appears when the governess is walking around Bly in "a mood
ofpossessiveness and justification" and wishing to be seen and approved of by the employer. This
wish to be known by God not as she really is but as she wishes to see herself, Voegelin suggests,
unconsciously invites the demonic presence. "The apparition has materialized out of her dream--
and when a woman dreams of someone who will know her, she may be known by someone other
than she dreamt" (16).

Voegelin provides an interesting analysis of the governess's remarks about "nature" in her
narration of her final encounter with Miles.

At this juncture she felt `how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to
shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against
nature.' The interruption with the `employer' is now driven a step further; the will has become rigid
in its blindness to the supernatural. The supernatural is, `revoltingly, against nature.' And what is
this `nature'? Here James himself puts the term into ironical inverted commas. `I could only get on
at all by taking `nature' into my confidence and my account.' What is going on must still be
happening within `nature.' The `monstrous ordeal' of the governess can be no more than `a push in
a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant.' It can demand no more by way of treatment than
the means which she has employed hitherto, that is `another turn of the screw of ordinary human
virtue.' She has a little doubt whether it will work, for, after all, this is an `attempt to supply, one's
self, all the nature.' No more will be thrown into this last battle than the nature and will of the ego.
And, let us not forget, the nature and common sense of the housekeeper have departed with Flora.
So the governess begins turning the screw still further (14).

Unfortunately, in the penultimate paragraph of this letter, Voegelin mars his otherwise coherent
presentation by suggesting that "Quint and Miss Jessel, in the mythical pre-history of the story
have been united by an unspeakable bond" of brother-sister incest and that "the ultimate,
metaphysical conception of James goes back to a vision of the cosmic drama of good and evil as
an incestuous affair in the divinity" (23-24). Voegelin never develops the idea of "the mythical pre-
history of the story" and never explains what he means by "an incestuous affair in the divinity"--
which, come to think of it, may be just as well.

In his subsequent commentary on the letter to Heilman, Voegelin declared, I no longer believe that
James's symbolism permits a direct translation into the language of philosophy at all. This decision
was not reached in a day but reflects the change in our view of modern literary and ideological
movements that has occurred since the last World War (25-26).

Voegelin began by notingncongruity between the meaning...in terms of God and man, the Puritan
soul and common sense, the passion of self-salvation, grace, and damnation and the Jamesian
symbols which carried these meanings...surrounded by a ghostly aura of indistinctness (25-26).

Furthermore, when Voegelintried to pursue the symbols through the labyrinth of the story, the
distinct core tended to be shrouded by the fogginess of meaning that pervaded the work as a whole.
How did, for instance, the drama of the Puritan soul come by the motif of incest? Or, how did the
splendid young man in Harley Street, the symbolistic God, come by his rather peculiar divine
nature? Or, what kind of a Garden of Eden--the symbol to which Heilman had given special
attention--was this garden of the story that could be understood as the Heavenly Paradise in which
the original fall had occurred, but also as the Terrestrial Paradise into which the `governess' had
been released, and then would ironically change into the locale of the unparadisical mess a
`governing' soul makes of the human condition? Or, what relation did the symbolistic garden bear
to the school from which the little boy was dismissed? (26)

Voegelin, like Enck--discussed in the preceding chapter--considers this failure of the parts
coherently to "hang together" yielding a definite meaning to be endemic to twentieth century art.
"The fuzziness of the symbols," he says, as well as the general fogginess of meaning pervading the
work, is caused...by a certain deformation of personal and social reality that was experienced as
such by artists at the turn of the century and expressed by means of symbolistic art. The
indistinctness and ambiguity is inherent to the symbols which express deformed reality (27).

Throughout his article, with considerable erudition, Voegelin provides evidence of the
pervasiveness of this "indistinctness and ambiguity," citing numerous examples not only from
literature, but also from painting, sculpture, music, and architecture. Unlike Enck, however, who
saw this development as evidence of an evolutionary leap in the history of consciousness--an
ability to simultaneously see reality from many angles--Voegelin sees this development as a
manifestation of an underlying spiritual pathology, an intellectual blindness resulting from a
rejection of God and objective truth in favor of narcissistic self-idolization. The rejection of God
and transcendence, says Voegelin, constitutes afateful shift in Western society from existence in
openness toward the cosmos to existence in the mode of closure against, and denial of, its reality.
As the process gains momentum, the symbols of open existence--God, man, the divine origin of
the cosmos, and the divine logos permeating its order--lose the vitality of their truth and are
eclipsed by the imagery of a self-creative, self-realizing, self-expressing, self-ordering, and self-
saving ego that is thrown into, and confronted with, an immanently closed world (27).

In art this "deformation" makes impossible the creation of a work such as "an Aeschylean drama in
which the full articulation of various tensions is the mode of consciousness that makes the drama a
tragedy" (27) and leads instead to dream worlds that are meant to replace the world of God's
making--be they the imagery of artists and poets, or the systems of speculative thinkers, or the
dreams of social metastasis through revolutionary violence (34).

The inclusion of the latter possibility reveals Voegelin's all-pervasive conservative bias. The
"deformation" of consciousness which he so strongly discountenances is, he contends, responsible
not only for unsatisfying art, but also for anarchy and tyranny. Thus, "immanentist" thinkers such
as Hegel and Nietzsche are at least partly responsible for movements such fascism and Nazism.
Thus Voegelin ridicules "our contemporary neo-Hegelian professors" who "are shocked when their
students respond to `critical theory' with uncritical violence" (35) and "the closed Eden" of such
thinkers becomes an arena for "the men of action `who make their strength their God' (Habakkuk
1:11)" (33).

Voegelin compares the garden symbolism in The Turn of the Screw to Milton's Eden. In both
cases, he suggests, "paradise is somehow out of focus, measured by the standards of a paradise that
is lost for good and will be regained only through grace in death." In the Jamesian novella, the
Paradise in which unspeakable things have happened among Quint, Miss Jessel, and the
children....is lost. At the beginning of the story, it has become the paradise regained in which the
governess is given her chance. At the end of the story, the paradise regained has become a paradise
lost again (28-29).

Similarly, says Voegelin, Milton's Adam and Eve, upon their expulsion, are promised "A Paradise
within thee happier far" which becomes the "tortured symbolism of an Eden dragging through
history toward the end of its misery in metastatic conflagration" as "the Edens begin to multiply."
Christ overcomes Satan and establishes a new Eden, but, again, "man succumbs to temptation and
sinks into pagan idolatry" or "Catholic horror," which, in turn, must be supplanted by a new Eden,
a Puritan theocracy. This Calvinist thinking, according to Voegelin, is the beginning of the self-
idolizing "deformation":

Does Milton's paradise, so blandly lost, still symbolize man's knowledge of a perfection that is not
his in time and space? Can one really lose a paradise that is not present in the daily loss of the
perfection man strives for in his imperfection? No, Milton has not lost paradise, and, therefore,
cannot regain it. He wants perfection in this world; he wants his Eden now...(31).

This "immanentist" concept of perfection leads to Pelagian self-reliance and a confusion between
God and demonic forces within man--these patterns are reflected in both Milton and James.

The whole Trinity has been badly deformed by Milton. The Father has become a remote destiny
that throws man into his condition and leaves him to shift for himself--as does James's young man
in Harley Street. Man has become an `Energy' bounded by `Reason,' and `the Governor or Reason
is called Messiah'--James's governess. And the Spirit is a vacuum--James's interception of the
communications with Harley Street. The series of deformations leaves the Devil as the reality of
man's life, of an energy bounded by reason (32).

Voegelin's provocative thoughts are certainly not above all question. His view of a rejection of
transcendence beginning at the Renaissance is at least partly a psychological projection of his own.
We could find considerable "closure" in the anti-empirical bias of medieval scholasticism, and
there are no one to one correspondences between people's artistic tastes and the state of their souls.
Voegelin's reactions to the artistic works of James and others are certainly not the only possible
responses. For example, in the Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris...the accumulation of the master's
work overpowers the viewer with the pedantic richness of its ornamental sterility....in the recently
restored Franz von Stuck Villa in Munich...the somnambulisme ideal of the implacably
ornamented walls and ceilings oppresses the visitor so badly that with a sigh of relief he escapes
from this prison the artist built for himself (38).

The reader of the Jamesian canon, says Voegelin, will be struck by James's power of observation,
by his perceptive irony, and his strength of intellect in developing the characters and their
story....The figures, in search of a reality they somehow miss, are to James more than curious
objects of realistic study; he is conscious of the deformity which compels them to create the carceri
of their Edens; and he leaves no doubt about their being lost souls who mistake the divertissements
offered by the world for its reality and get caught in their mistake. By this first impression, the
reader's interest will be aroused. He wants to see more of the world through the eyes of an author
who could produce this gem...he wants to watch the comedie humaine in which this case study of
futile existence, he assumes, can occupy no more than a subordinate place; and above all, he wants
to see the author's mind at work on the open existence which seems to form the background to his
ironic study of closure. But when the reader, then, proceeds from what he may consider a minor
exercise of the author's abilities to other works of his, he will be dismayed by discovering one such
study of existential deformity following the other. The world that would put these no-worlds of
bungled lives in critical perspective somehow does not open. He will wonder why the author
should indulge in this relentless pursuit of deformity... (41-42).

However, Voegelin's suggestions, even if questionable, are undeniably thought provoking. If

scholarship is an ongoing conversation, Voegelin's original evaluation of the work's elusiveness
and his relating of this evaluation to so much intellectual and artistic history is certainly a valuable
contribution to the conversation.

2. Criticism Acknowledging the Work's Insoluble Ambiguity

A number of critics during this period sought not to resolve the work's ambiguity by ascertaining its
"true" meaning, but rather to explain the genesis within the text of inherent and insoluble ambiguity
and/or the effects of such ambiguity on the reader.

a. Conflicting Interpretations of the Novella Used to Make Points About Epistemology, Criticism,
and Interpretation: Brenda Murphy

Brenda Murphy surveyed the long history of conflicting interpretations proffered by reputable
critics and concluded that the controversies can never be resolved, that no definitive answers can be
found to the questions the text raises. Furthermore, according to Murphy, the problems which arise
from the attempt to interpret The Turn of the Screw are problems endemic to the hermeneutic
enterprise itself because such problems are rooted in epistemology and the nature of
communication.

For example, the conflicting evidence from the text suggests, Murphy says, that we cannot divine
the author's intentions from such analysis--cannot, for example, determine whether he intended to
write a ghost story or a story of mental illness. A pattern discerned in the text cannot provide a
definitive answer because such a method traps a critic in the hermeneutic circle....He brings
a...conceptual framework with him to the text....the critic will be trying to understand the author's
meaning in the context of an `extrinsic genre,' having already deprived himself of the possibility of
grasping the author's actual `intrinsic genre.' Thus, the Freudian critic, or the myth critic, or the
religious critic, or anyone with a predetermined framework for interpreting the author's work, is in
the position of the viewer of an opera who has the preconceived notion that what he is watching is
only a play. What he sees is no doubt there, and is significant and entertaining, but it cannot be
denied that he is missing the greater part of the show (192-193).

Murphy then turns to James's statements about the story. These statements, of course, are
enigmatic, as I demonstrated in the first chapter of this dissertation. But Murphy pinpoints two
other problems which would apply to any attempt to discern an author's intentions from statements
he has made about his own work. First, the author's statements may not be sincere. Murphy cites
Kenton, Cargill, Bewley, and Rubin, who have taken this position. Secondly,

other critics (Edmund Wilson, Robert Heilman, Muriel West, Martha Banta, Juliet McMaster) take
the preface to be half-truth , dealing only with the surface of James's `real' meaning. Still others
(Mark Spilka, Daniel Troy, Francis Roellinger, Robert Wolff) see the preface as simply rational
commentary on a story whose meaning exists only in James's subconscious or imagination.

Murphy concludes this discussion by noting that "at least two critics (Eric Solomon and Duncan
Aswell) have summarily ignored the statements in the preface and established quite disparate
interpretations through close readings of the text alone" (194).

We cannot with certainty ascertain an author's unconscious intention, says Murphy, "because it is
impossible to determine an unconscious purpose or intent unless...it is made conscious" (195). We
must interpret an author's words and actions, in psychoanalysis, much as we interpret a text--and
here the hermeneutic circle reappears. In deciding what evidence is relevant, we are ruled, at least
in part, by our own preconceptions. "It is my belief," says Murphy, "that...failure [is] inevitable, for
the problem of the hermeneutic circle is not simply a problem of validity, but a basic fact of
perception and communication" (197). Furthermore, Murphy cites Hirsch's statement that the
author's "`willed meaning deliberately embraces analogous and unforeseeable implications'....Thus
Hirsch takes a work of literature to be analogous to a law which may have implications which are
not known to its originator, but are generated by the `purpose and intent' of the law" (195).

b. The Ambiguity and Its Place in Literary History: Wirth-Nesher, Merivale

These two critics considered the novella's inherent and unresolvable ambiguity to be part of a
pattern in modern literature. In their attempts to understand the work by relating it to other literary
works without arguing for a direct causal connection, as in a source study, these critics are similar
to Heilman (in his 1961 article comparing The Turn of the Screw to Duerrenmatt's The Pledge),
Feuerlicht, and Enck (all discussed in the preceding chapter of this dissertation). These approaches
show the influence of structuralism's perception of literature as an isolated and self-referential
world.

Hana Wirth-Nesher combines the above approach with a reader-response approach based in
cultural history. She compares The Turn of the Screw to Heart of Darkness and contrasts both with
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Generalizing from the reactions of students in her literature classes and
conversations with her academic colleagues, Wirth-Nesher suggests that the latter book has largely
lost its ability to terrify while the former two have not. The reason for this, she suggests, is that we
are no longer intrigued by works that appear to be self-contained, that pose conflicts and resolve
them, but we are increasingly more drawn to works that lure us down dark corridors where we lose
our way. We return from the text not by finding the right way out, but by recognizing the
tenuousness and artifice both of the house of fiction and of our own fixed sense of self. There are
no revelatory endings in these works by James and Conrad (317).

Wirth-Nesher makes a number of telling comparisons between Marlow and the governess--
especially in regard to the "double" and "rescue" (325) motifs in the two stories. Both stories are
told by an unreliable narrator attempting to rescue a victim who doesn't want to be rescued from a
poorly defined evil which is largely a projection of the narrator's "own tabooed desires" (321). We
respond to the works because the uncertainty they generate is met by the uncertainty we willingly
provide. Both nouvelles are about the terror of having to make moral choices on uncertain
perceptions of evil; they are about false or exaggerated notions of innocence and the evil unleashed
in trying to preserve what is only a fraud. And finally, they are structures of words acting as
conspiracies of silence. There may be quiet streets in Stevenson's London, but even the sound of
footsteps muffled by the night fog in that ordered world cannot compare to the vague stirrings and
rustlings of Bly and the jungle (325).

Patricia Merivale takes a similar approach, comparing The Turn of the Screw to other "gothic"
works--particularly, Witold Gombricz's Pornografia. The Turn of the Screw, says Merivale, like
The Sacred Fount, [draws] upon numerous familiar conventions of Gothic fiction--ghosts, doubles,
haunted houses, and all the tricks of psychological sadism--to make serious statements about the
kind of modern self-reflexive fiction that, like earlier Gothic artist parables by Balzac, Hoffmann,
Hawthorne, and Poe, exemplifies the Romantic position that the poet is accursed and the artistic
process at best morally dubious (992).

This "significant fictional mode" is fiction about fiction and thus reflects--as does the type of
criticism in which Wirth-Nesher and Merivale are engaging--the structuralist view of literature as a
self-referential universe. In these works an artist hero, whether as voyeur or stage director, uses the
lives of others as the raw material for his own `work of art,' which is contained within, and is the
main substance of, the text we read (992).

We see, thus, "the books narcissistically contemplating their own images, the authors writing about
themselves writing" (993). Ambiguity is essential because the Gothic is "a deformed sibling" of the
detective genre in which we see the outer world in terms of the inner....Both genres, detective story
and horror story, being not only about what we perceive but about how we perceive it, and about
the ways in which the `how' actually changes the `what,' yield fundamental patterns and structures
for self-regarding, form-obsessed modernist fiction... (992).

In both The Turn of the Screw and Pornografia, "the narrators repeatedly think of themselves as
insane, or likely to become so, and observe that others do also" (997). The narrator of Pornografia
is a lecherous old stage manager who, along with his aged homosexual partner, formulates "a plot
to bring about a corollary pairing of the young" in a country house like Bly. Both men are attracted
to a teenage boy named Karol. They pair with him a girl, Henia, in order to watch and achieve a
vicarious sexual satisfaction--"For us, who were too old, it was the only possibility of an erotic
contact with them" (qtd. in Wirth-Nesher 999). The similarities to The Turn of the Screw are
striking. First, there are "the surface relationships":

Quint and Jessel, Miles and Flora constitute the same sort of erotic quartet as Frederic and Witold,
Henia and Karol, while the shadow relationship of the Governess turning her imagination into
reality, by way of manipulative pressures, is as much part of Frederick and Witold's role as is a
straightforward `diabolism' like Quint and Jessel's (999-1000).

Furthermore, the narrator's distorted perception finally, in some sense, becomes reality--the
governess's `obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature'...succeeds in
destroying Miles and Flora; a similar 'obtrusion' eventually makes Karol and Henia as guilty as they
were at first merely imagined to be (1000).

c. Reader-Response Criticism Employing Psychoanalysis of a Fictional Character to Explain

Ambiguity: Huntley
Huntley suggests that the ghosts are projections of repressed aspects of the governess's own
personality--specifically, "hallucinated projections of her own sublimated feelings toward the
master" (232), as well as externalizations of "that very possessiveness she herself manifests toward
the children" (233), a possessiveness which finally destroys them. To support this interpretation,
Huntley cites from the text evidence of the kind adduced by Bontly (discussed in the previous
chapter)--incidents in which the behavior of the governess mirrors that of the ghosts. Huntley
recalls, for example, the governess standing where Quint had stood and, from his vantage point,
looking into the parlor (chapter four) or sinking down on the same step where she had previously
seen Miss Jessel sitting (chapter fifteen). Whereas Bontly had seen Miss Jessel as the governess's
hallucinated double and Quint as the sexualized counterpart of the employer and/or the governess's
father, Huntley suggests that--while Quint is the "evil opposite" (233) of the employer--the two
sexually related figures are, nevertheless, a unit, both representing the governess's "demonic" (232)
personality. In support of this contention Huntley recalls the "two double figures" in George Du
Maurier's Peter Ibbetson, which was "published in 1891, though he [Du Maurier] had described the
plot to James even earlier" (228).

Huntley is not interested in psychoanalyzing the governess for the sake of the analysis itself or in
arguing about what "really" happens in the plot. Indeed, Huntley rebukes critics who debate such
questions for too often obscuring the central artistic problem....We are not dealing here with the
real world where things either are or aren't, but with the quality and complexity of James'
imagination--specifically the particular problem posed by his subject, the handling of ghost
material (224).

Accordingly, Huntley's purpose in analyzing these hallucinations is to make a point about artistic
technique in the construction of the story--to argue that here, for the first time, James was
experimenting with the Doppelganger motif, an experiment aimed at solving a major problem of
form and effect in the work as James himself has described that problem in his various letters and
prefaces (224).

The "problem," of course, was how to "`rouse the dear old sacred terror'" and "keep the incredible
credible in an extended narrative" (226). "The answer," Huntley suggests, lay in that deliberately
ambiguous point of view, the use of a narrator who may or may not be mad, that delicately
maintained balance between genuine wraiths and a neurotic narrator, which between them could
evoke and sustain both credibility and terror without exhausting either (228).

We have such an "unreliable narrator" in this woman whose very acts and personality bear strange
correspondences to the creatures she describes to the unseeing around her, but with just enough
credence about her tale to give even the `unwary' pause before judging....a balance between fantasy
and reality so fine that to insist on some final 'explanation' is akin to hammering on butterflies
(237).

Critics who attempt to resolve the ambiguity are misguided because the ambiguity remains the
necessary condition of the tale itself, as James once tried to explain to a bewildered psychic
researcher. In The Turn of the Screw specifically, and some of his other tales generally, wrote
James, `the one thing and another that are questionable and ambiguous in them I mostly take to be
conditions of their having got themselves pushed through at all.' This, then, was the appropriate
form he decided upon (228).

Thus, Huntley's concern is with the reader's response to the work. His explanation is reminiscent of
Goddard's suggestion that, albeit perhaps unconsciously, the reader finds credible the story of a
deluded and dangerous governess even if the reader does not believe in ghosts. Like Sheppard,
Huntley considers James unlikely to have been familiar with technical psychoanalytic literature. He
argues, however, that the Doppelganger motif is pervasive in fiction with which James would have
been familiar--Poe's "Edmund Wilson," Dostoyevsky's "The Double," and Du Maurier's Peter
Ibbetson, for example. Huntley also cites parallels in other works of James--for example, "The Jolly
Corner" and The Sense of the Past. Moreover, the familiar characteristics of the double figure as it
has traditionally appeared in western and Slavic literature are fairly constant: These characteristics
may be summed up as follows: (1) the state of anxiety which both precedes and prompts the
appearance of the double; (2) a sense of premonition in the primary self at the approach of the
double; (3) a mood of timelessness and isolation which envelops the beholder during the
experience; (4) a vague and troubled sense of having known this figure previously; (5) the double's
role as moral and intellectual antithesis of the surface personality, often resulting in its rejection by
the primary self; and (6) a peculiar duplication of action, posture, or mood between the primary self
and the double. While all of these characteristics are present in The Turn of the Screw, they do not
always occur with both Peter Quint and Miss Jessel; but between the two of them James has given
sufficient hints as to what he was up to (228-229).

d. Reader-Response Criticism Focusing on the Implied Reader in the Ambiguous Text: Felman,
Kevin Murphy, MacNaughton, Obuchowski, Stepp

The story's ambiguity, according to Shoshana Felman, is rooted in the three-narrator narrative
frame. Such a frame provides no basis for deciding between the conflicting perspectives of various
characters within the story. We expect the narrator to provide such a touchstone, she suggests, but
our expectations are undercut by the plurality of narrators. "The story's origin," in other words,

seems to depend on the authority of the story teller, i.e., of the narrator, who is usually supposed to
be both the story's literal source and the depository of the knowledge out of which the story springs
and which the telling must reveal. But while the prologue's function would thus seem to be to relate
the story to its narrator, the prologue of The Turn of the Screw rather disconnects the story from the
narrator since it introduces not one narrator, but three....The story's origin is therefore not assigned
to any one voice which would assume responsibility for the tale, but to the deferred action of a sort
of echoing effect, produced--`after the fact'--by voices which themselves re-produce previous
voices (120-121).

Because no narrator serves as a veridical touchstone for evaluating incomplete evidence,

contradictory clues, and varying perspectives, there are no "innocent readers" of this story. This,
says Felman, is precisely the "trap" which James intended to create by this narrative structure.

The trap, indeed, resides precisely in the way in which these...opposing types of reading are
themselves inscribed and comprehended in the text. The reader of The Turn of the Screw can
choose either to believe the governess and thus to behave like Mrs. Grose, or not to believe the
governess, and thus to behave precisely like the governess. Since it is the governess who, within the
text, plays the role of the suspicious reader, occupies the place of the interpreter, to suspect that
place and that position is, therefore, to take it. To demystify the governess is only possible on one
condition: the condition of repeating the governess's very gesture. The text thus constitutes a
reading of its two possible readings, both of which it deconstructs (190).

Thus, one cannot "interpret" the text from outside the text. To attempt to "interpret" this work or
resolve its ambiguity is to participate in a controversy in which the fictional characters are
participating.
One of the richest and most illuminating elements in Felman's essay is her survey of critical
reactions to The Turn of the Screw to demonstrate how the critics have unwittingly been brought
into the story as participants. Felman notes the intensely personal reactions of even the earliest
reviews--The Outlook, for example describing the story as "`distinctly repulsive'" and The
Independent calling it "`the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read....The story...affects
the reader with a disgust that not be expressed.'" What is significant in this and similar reviews,
says Felman, is the fact that "what is perceived as the most scandalous thing about this scandalous
story is that we are forced to participate in the scandal, that the reader's innocence cannot remain
intact" (96-97).

Later, says Felman, "when the pronouncements of the various sides of the controversy are
examined closely, they are found to repeat unwittingly--with a spectacular regularity--all the main
lexical motifs of the text." For example, Felman finds "the motif of a danger which must be
averted" in Fagin's remark that "`the danger in the psychoanalytic method of criticism lies in its
apparent plausibility.'" "The motif of a violent aggression inflicted upon an object by an injurious,
alien force" is reflected in the following statement of Heilman: "`The Freudian reading of Henry
James "The Turn of the Screw"...does violence not only to the story but also to the Preface.'" Oliver
Evans repeats "the motif of attack and defense, of confrontation and struggle" when he "proposes
that Wilson's theory be `attacked point by point.'" Katherine Anne Porter repeats "the motif of final
victory, of the enemy's defeat" when she says, "`Here is one place where I find Freud completely
defeated.'" Felman finds the motif of "salvation" in Heilman's assertion that "`The Turn of the
Screw is worth saving'" from the "psychoanalytic reading's abuses." Spilka--when he says,
"`Freudian critics of the tale are strongly prepossessed'"--seems to Felman to be suggesting that
psychoanalytic critics are "possessed...by the ghost of Freud" as Miles and Flora are possessed by
the ghosts of Quint and Jessel. These statements of Heilman and Spilka, according to Felman,
mirror the exorcistic operations of the governess vis a vis her `possessed' charges, and...the critical
confrontation appears itself as a kind of struggle against some ghost-effect that has somehow been
awakened by psychoanalysis.

On the other hand, when Heilman accuses Wilson of "`hysterical blindness'" for the latter's alleged
misinterpretation of James's use of the word "authority" in the Preface, Wilson's reading is thus
polemicized into a hysterical reading, itself viewed as a neurotic symptom....it is the very critic who
excludes the hypothesis of neurosis from the story, who is rediscovering neurosis in Wilson's
critical interpretation of the story, an interpretation which he rejects precisely on the grounds that
pathology as such cannot explain the text... (98-103).

Felman suggests that critics such as Wilson who stand "outside" the story and attempt to resolve its
questions with some "objective" explanation do violence to the story. Wilson, in attempting to
answer Mrs. Griffin's question--to make explicit the hidden love story, is doing what Douglas says
the text refuses to do.

`The story won't tell; not in any literal, vulgar way.' These textual lines could be read as an ironic
note through which James's text seems to be commenting upon Wilson's reading. And this Jamesian
commentary seems to be suggesting that such a reading might indeed be inaccurate not so much
because it is incorrect or false, but because it is, in James's terms, vulgar (107).

Such a "vulgar" reading does violence to the subtleties of the text, in its unconscious depths,
strangling the unconscious as the governess strangled Miles to force some "rudimentary, reductive"
(107) answer.

And such a "vulgar" reading does violence to the Freudian texts it employs--especially if Freud is
interpreted as Lacan interprets him. Critics who reductively interpret the text simplify language,
which is inherently and ineradicably ambiguous, and also simplify sexuality. According to Lacan,
the ambiguity of language--its tendency to always "miss," to never fully coincide with meaning, is
related to a lack of satisfaction inherent in sexuality. Both language and sexuality arise from the
drive to regain oneness with the mother's body, a oneness which is irretrievably lost. Felman cites a
case in which a Viennese woman, recently divorced, consulted a physician, superficially acquainted
with Freud's theories, who advised her that "`lack of sexual satisfaction'" was her main problem--
`"and so there were only three ways by which she could recover her health--she must either return
to her husband, or take a lover, or obtain satisfaction from herself.'" Felman perceives an analogy
between the rather comical situation Freud describes and the so-called Freudian treatment of the
governess by Wilson. In both cases, the reference to Freud's theory is as brutally and as crudely
literal, reducing the psychoanalytic explanation to the simple `lack of sexual satisfaction' (108).

This physician, Felman suggests, failed to realize that "`lack of satisfaction'...is not simply an
accident in sexual life, it is essentially inherent in it" because sexuality is rooted in a desire for
something inescapably lost. "`All human structures,' says Lacan, after Freud, `have as their essence
not as an accident, the restraint of pleasure--of fulfillment'" (111).

Thus, the "vulgarity" of critics such as Wilson is the physician's ignorance applied to language.
They misunderstand language as the physician misunderstood sexuality.

The literal is `vulgar' because it stops the movement constitutive of meaning, because it blocks and
interrupts the endless process of metaphysical substitution. The vulgar, therefore, is anything which
misses, or falls short of, the dimension of the symbolic, anything which rules out, or excludes,
meaning as a loss and as a flight,--anything which strives, in other words, to eliminate from
language its inherent silence, anything which misses the specific way in which a text actively
`won't tell' (107).

The true concern of psychoanalysis, Felman suggests, is rather that through which meaning in the
text does not come off, that which in the text, and through which the text, fails to mean, that which
can engender but a conflict of interpretations, a critical debate and discord precisely like the
polemic which surrounds The Turn of the Screw and with which we are concerned here (112).

Felman's article is a masterful synthesis of structuralism and reader-response psychoanalysis

leading to a "deconstruction" of the text.

W.R. MacNaughton rejoices in "the story's richness--its ability to stimulate so many plausible
interpretations" (22). He attempts to understand this "rich" ambiguity by examining the tale in the
"context...of the rest of James's first-person fiction" (19). Such an examination reveals a pattern
whereby James makes it excruciatingly difficult for his narrators to see clearly the evidence upon
which action must be based and thus for his readers to decide unequivocally whether his narrators
have been wise or unwise, just or unjust. A reader puzzled by the resulting ambiguity should be
encouraged to discover its causes and, in so doing, to recognize its implications in these stories of
which he was originally unaware. There may be social implications, for example: how can a person
evaluate evidence if the source of it is a hypocrite or a bigot? How can one see in a milieu where
faces meet faces? There may be psychological implications as well: how can one observe clearly if
his vision is fogged by an obsession? A tale's ambiguity can serve as a reward for the type of reader
whom James most admired because whoever is willing to give intelligently of himself in
responding to the challenge offered by a story is able to learn progressively more about the
characters and the world which they inhabit (22).
It is easy to see the similarity between MacNaughton's approach and Felman's. Both see the reader
forced, by the structure of the text, to become an active participant within the story's world. Yet
MacNaughton disagrees with critics such as Vaid who see the governess primarily as a narrative
technique rather than a character. These narrators, he says, are complex characters with prejudices
"greatly influenced by the credo of...society" (21) and moral failures such as pride. It is in judging
the character, as well as the evidence, that the reader participates in the text.

Peter A. Obuchowski contends that "James's technique" makes a definitive reading of The Turn of
the Screw impossible and its ambiguity ineradicable. This "technique" is to provide "a narrator
without providing a touchstone for judging the truth or falsity of her account," along with "too
much conflicting evidence for anyone to establish convincingly the view of her that James intends"
(380). Obuchowski makes some very interesting observations about the triple narrator frame,
suggesting that "James uses the frame to confuse further the center of authority" by presenting "the
characterization of the governess by Douglas" when "the relationship between the governess and
Douglas remains ambiguous." Furthermore, "the narrator's sympathy with Douglas" suggests that
this guest may have altered the manuscript in transcription to protect Douglas and/or the governess.
Furthermore, "one is left wondering about the immediate aftermath of the events at Bly"--the
possibility of a criminal investigation of Miles's death, for example--and Douglas does not address
these questions in the prologue. "The Turn of the Screw, however, makes one ask such questions by
drawing attention to them" (381-382).

Such narrators, Obuchowski contends, take the author out of the book and force the reader to
become directly involved in the story....This technique leads to ambiguity and forces the reader to
participate actively ....James manipulates his narrators and, by extension, his fictional world to
involve the reader totally. The reader is forced to puzzle the book together (382-383).

Obuchowski relates this process to James's often stated attempt "to make the novel more realistic"
as the reader "meets the governess much as he meets a person in a real-life situation" (383).

Obuchowski contends--like Krook and Felman, among others--that "the reader is made to operate
much like the governess" (387) because his information is what she provides. He offers an
interesting theory as to how this fact increases the story's uncanny effect.

Like her, he must judge with incomplete or distorted knowledge. In relationship to both the
governess and the children, one has the eerie sensation that he is either being taken in by evil or
misjudging innocence....In her presence he experiences the unsettling fear that besets the sound
mind when exposed for too long a period of time to certain forms of mental illness. He finds
himself thinking like her (388).

Although his main concern is to understand the story's psychological effects on the reader rather
than to elucidate a philosophical theme, Obuchowski does find a theme similar to the theme critics
such as Enck and Krook perceive:

Reduced to theme, the novel is a Jamesian statement on the nature of reality. James presents reality
as flux and complex process. No one perceives it in exactly the same way as another, and no one
sees it wholly. Such a relativistic view leads, of course, to ambiguity and little prospect for human
certainty (385).

Kevin A. Murphy, like the above critics, attempts to explain the tale's "ultimate opacity" by
analyzing "some of the strategies James employs to prevent a consistent reading of the text" (539).
In a formulation reminiscent of Felman, Murphy argues that the reader is forced, by the structure of
the text, to repeat the experience of the governess. Because of the inconclusive evidence presented
by the story, the reader is forced, like the governess at Bly, to confront and interpret an ambiguous
situation. It then matters not whether the reader subscribes to an apparitionist or a non-apparitionist
interpretation.

In either case...we repeat the governess's behavior: in response to our 'bewilderment of vision'
concerning this ambiguous character, we must create beyond the fragments to make sense of what
we see (550).

In asserting that a large part of the reader's task is judging the "character" of the governess, Murphy
is reminiscent of MacNaughton. Murphy, like Obuchowski, suggests that the reader is led astray, at
least initially, by Douglas's good recommendation in the prologue. Because the reader initially
trusts her, his subsequent questioning of her veracity replicates her bewilderment over the "reality"
of Quint.

Just as the governess has difficulty meshing her inward image of the handsome bachelor with her
outward perception of the man on the tower, we too have difficulty coming to terms with our
apparition, the governess herself. Our introduction to this character is entirely favorable:....With the
shift to the governess's first-person narration, our imagination, in a sense, turns real: the governess
is before us, as worthy and agreeable as she has been reported to be. The verification of her
apparition of the dead Quint explains fully, or at least deflects our attention away from, the
discordant elements in her personality. But, as the tale progresses, these discordant traits move
closer and closer to the foreground. The governess's defensive snobbery concerning her ambiguous
office, her constant interpretation of events to highlight her own altruism, and her obsession to save
the children at any cost all become more pronounced and sinister (547).

The apparent agreement between Douglas and the first narrator, Murphy suggests, mirrors the
apparent agreement between the governess and Mrs. Grose concerning the events at Bly. In both
cases the collaboration further confuses the reader. Upon first consideration the affinity between
Douglas and the first narrator seems to enhance Douglas's authority and support his evaluation of
the governess (this is Allen's main point), just as Mrs. Grose's apparent concurrence--the
"identification scene," for example--seems to validate the interpretations of the governess. Closer
reflection, however, reveals that these collaborating witnesses are unreliable themselves. The first
narrator, for example, seems preoccupied with the handsome employer--infatuated in somewhat the
same way as the governess. This narrator asks Douglas if the position at Bly "`brought with it...'"
and is interrupted by Douglas's completion, "`Necessary danger to life?''' "Of the hundreds of ways
Douglas might have completed this thought," says Murphy, he naturally chooses the one that sums
up the drift of his forthcoming tale. But if we look at what precedes the remark, there is no reason
to suppose that Douglas's completion would have been exactly or even roughly the same as the
narrator's. The narrator is more than happy to accept Douglas's completion since it marks him as an
acute, as opposed to literal-minded or vulgar, listener, and thus he continues, with increasing
confidence, to collaborate in the anticipations. The entanglement of the narrator is so complete by
the time Douglas opens the manuscript that, when Douglas responds to one of the ladies that his
story has no title, the narrator interrupts emphatically, `Oh I have!'...But it is too late: Douglas
begins to read the manuscript with the narrator and the rest of the assembly listening intently while
we puzzle momentarily over what the narrator's title might have been (540-541).

The significance of Mrs. Grose's collaboration is similarly ambiguous. Murphy, like Cole, calls
attention to the language barrier which separates the two women and which may plausibly account
for misunderstandings between them. Furthermore, Murphy reminds us that the governess
misrepresents the facts when she tells Mrs. Grose that Miss Jessel has spoken to her in the
schoolroom, and he suggests that she may similarly be deceiving the reader when she reports that
Mrs. Grose has positively identified Peter Quint on the basis of the governess's detailed description
of the man seen looking through the window of the parlor.

Seizing on the ambiguous blending of the identities of Douglas and Miles noted by critics such as
Collins, Rubin, and Trachtenberg, Walter Stepp finds another implied reader imbedded in the
structure of the text: Douglas, the grownup Miles, to whom the governess's manuscript is
addressed. This implicit, intuitive dialogue between the older, wiser governess and Douglas--or
Miles Douglas ....the revelation of Miles as `thou' to the governess' `I' will point to the chief source
of that rich reverberation that Heilman notes (76).

Stepp is similar to Hallab in locating this "rich reverberation" in the synthesis of previously
seemingly conflicting elements of the psyche. Stepp suggests that the grown woman is confessing
her love to the man--with both of them integrating the destructive experiences of Bly into some
new synthesis of wholeness and love.

The felt mystery...has resided perhaps in the fact that what is sundered in the reader's
understanding--i.e., Miles, the boy who `died,' and Douglas, the living man--is unified and
continuous in the governess's perception. Rather, I should say, in her `apperception.' This
apperceptive dimension of The Turn of the Screw--the sense of return and of `know[ing] the place
for the first time'--forms the matrix for the largest `re-cognitions' of James's great tale; and it is the
key recognition, first of all, of Douglas as Miles, which unlocks the rest (976).

Stepp's essay is most valuable for the questions it raises and the doors it opens. He does not,
however, pursue these possibilities as systematically and thoroughly as we might hope. For
example, in commenting on the "son-mother relationship of Miles and the governess" which
"becomes more complex as we begin to touch on the unspoken love between them," Stepp says,
"For present purposes we may pass over the Oedipal complications of the story in the lighthearted,
worldly way of Mrs. Griffin" (81). And yet, these "Oedipal complications" seem central to Stepp's
understanding of the reader's response to the story. He seems to suggest that the reader attains some
deep but non-incestuous union with his pre-Oedipal mother memory--perhaps with the archetype in
the unconscious which represents the mother. This union, he seems to suggest, is central to the
rebirth experience.

Judgment must wait on recapitulation of the experience--the death and rebirth--of the boy, Miles,
through the man, Douglas. And to pass through the Miles-Douglas experience is to more closely
accompany the governess on her strange journey, for their fates are as closely linked as a son's and
a mother's (81).

This experience occurs in microcosm in the prologue, Stepp suggests, in the opening anecdote
about the little boy who awakened his mother at night to perceive a horrible vision which, in turn,
terrified her, his would-be consoler. "The boy," Stepp tells us, has not wakened his mother `to
dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again,' as we may imagine most children might:...`but to
encounter also herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that has shocked
him.'...The boy, it seems, calls upon his mother to witness, even resisting her solace until she has
done so. A remarkable boy. He wants his mother to see and therefore believe in the terrible vision
he faces--`to encounter' it. He does not want it sugared over with a `most liberal faith'; he wants his
mother's deepest faith and he cannot have it, of course, if she merely humors the vision in the
maternal way as, say, a fairy tale. A too-ready comfort will be of no use to him when the dread
appearance comes again, as it must" (80).

The boy's experience is repeated in the relationship of Miles to the governess. The governess's
experience, in all its horror, equals whatever Miles experienced.

We end where we began, as in the famous phrase, and know the place for the first time: as the boy
wakened his mother to witness the dread vision, so was he wakened by her, by her dread vision.
Now he has seen what she has seen, and he does not judge her. They have encountered, together,
the same sight (81).

e. Linguistically Based Criticism: The Ambiguity Embedded in the Linguistic Structures of the
Text: Brooke-Rose and Rimmon

During this period two important, linguistically oriented studies appeared which attempted to locate
the genesis of the story's ambiguity in the linguistic structures of the text. A full treatment of these
studies would take us away from literary criticism and into the related but distinct discipline of
scientific linguistics. Accordingly, we shall only indicate here the broad outlines of these
approaches.

In 1976 and 1977 Christine Brooke-Rose published a series of three related articles on The Turn of
the Screw in Poetics and Theory of Literature.

In the first of these, "`The Turn of the Screw' and Its Critics," she surveyed the major
interpretations of the story, showing how the apparitionist and non-apparitionist arguments cancel
one another, with both sides citing what appears to be persuasive evidence from the text and
sometimes the very same evidence (because much of the evidence can be interpreted in
diametrically opposite ways). This, she holds, has arisen from a misunderstanding of the genre. The
Turn of the Screw "more than perfectly illustrates the narrow definition of the pure fantastic given
by Todorov: the hesitation of the reader must be sustained to the end" (128). The "pure fantastic" is
a "hesitation" between a naturalistic and supernatural fabula, both existing implicitly in the same
text or sjuzvet. Critics have failed to realize this and thus have been led "into taking up positions for
or against one of the interpretations" (128).

More importantly, like Felman--although with different examples--she shows how the critics
unwittingly repeat the mental operations of the governess. Brooke-Rose's emphasis here is more
linguistic than Felman's. Brooke-Rose tends to concentrate more on how the governess's language--
with its implied thought processes and assumptions about reality--is reflected in the
"metalanguage" of the critics. For example the narrator's habit of sliding from supposition
(apparently) to assertion,(precisely) for what ought to be supposition ....and the critics constantly do
the same thing, using somehow, in some manner or other, in a manner of speaking, etc., where
precision is required, and evidently, clearly, etc. (not to mention simple assertion, as we shall see)
for what is only supposition (132).

Thus, Brooke-Rose compares the governess's forced hypothesis in chapter ten--"`There was clearly
another person above me--there was a person on the tower'" to Jones's statement that "`clearly
James did not intend to portray the governess as a sex-starved spinster, a hysterical personality
subject to hallucinations, a pathological liar' (nothing less clear than this)" (132-133). Further,
critics add subjective interpretations and misrepresentations when paraphrasing the events of the
story--Brooke-Rose recalls Kenton's phrase "`the little governess'"--and misrepresent the statements
of other critics. Moreover, "fallacious arguments" abound--for example, Reed's assertion that are
we as readers to accept it'....Mrs. Grose accepts the ghosts wholly and finally for an illogical
reason: Flora's language, which can just as easily be explained by the very `facts' from the past told
by Mrs. Grose....This same illogical reason is a proof for Reed sin`to the degree that Mrs. Grose
accepts the evidence so he identifies with Mrs. Grose (146).

These readings have occurred, Brooke-Rose suggests, because the work is structured (intentionally
or not) on the same principle that a neurosis is structured....And the structure of a neurosis involves
the attempt (often irresistible) to drag the `other' down into itself, into the neurosis, the other being
here the reader. This structure is successful, as we have seen, which is why I call the governess's
state (her language) `contagious' (156).

In the next two articles Brooke-Rose attempts to show how the above "structure" is embedded in
the text. In "`The Turn of the Screw': Mirror Structures as Basic Structures," she discusses the "bare
structure" of the work and the "mirror structure" through which the former is mediated. In "The
Surface Structures in The Turn of the Screw," she analyzes the work's "surface structures" and then
sums up the position which has been developed in the three articles. These articles have been
reprinted, with minor changes, in Brooke-Rose's book A Rhetoric of the Unreal. We will cite the
versions reprinted in the book.

Like most structuralists, Brooke-Rose recognizes the distinction between "story" and "discourse"--
histoire being the skeleton, or events as they are supposed to have occurred, discours being the
flesh and blood, or the way these events are presented, in time, speed, point of view, distancing,
etc., or what Genette...recognizes as time, mood, and voice. This distinction is the same made by
the Russian Formalists between fabula (histoire) and sjuzvet (discours or agencement, treatment)"
("Surface" 189).

The ambiguity exists because the structures of The Turn of the Screw equally support "two
mutually exclusive fabulas in that sjuzvet" ("Surface" 229)--namely, the apparitionist and non-
apparitionist fabulas.

These fabulas are embedded in a "bare structure": the "narrative frame," which consists of an
"injunction"--that she not "trouble" the employer; the injunction's "transgression"; and the "result"
of the transgression. The injunction takes place before she comes to Bly, and we are told about this
injunction in the prologue. The transgression is partly narrated in her account and partly implied by
her rendition of the events and the information supplied by Douglas.

...by the end of the governess's narrative she has not only decided to trouble him (though the letter
is stolen by Miles), she has also behaved in such a way as to involve him anyway (a sick child, then
a dead child) ("Basic" 175).

The "result" we are told in the prologue--her estrangement from the employer, and, finally, the
manuscript she sends to Douglas.

We are not of course told the sequel, except, in the Introduction, that `she never saw him again'. We
are left to infer some sort of involvement on his part, if not with her directly (something she could
not foresee), at least via Mrs. Grose, and since the Prologue also tells us that ten years later she was
governess to Douglas's sister, presumably she was not in any way blamed, or not sufficiently, to
prevent her from further practising her profession. And of course she was `cured', in the
hallucination theory, though still impelled to write her narrative in the form its real author presents
it to us. The real result, then, is not so much `punishment' as the text we read ("Basic" 175).
This "basic structure," according to Brooke-Rose, is presented to us "framed" in a "mirror
structure"--a set of reflecting dichotomies suggestive of reflections in a mirror. The macro-text
pattern--injunction, disobedience, result--is repeated in micro-text form in the governess's
narrative--in this case, the "injunction" being the order to "deal with" the letter from the headmaster
of Miles's school. Furthermore, this specific injunction is split into two mirroring
injunctions--"`deal with him, but mind you, don't report.'" These mirrored injunctions, Brooke-Rose
points out, put the governess in an impossible position. She disobeys (1) but obeys (2), at least for
the time being. It could be said that she disobeys (1) in order to obey (2), since a mere sister's
governess could probably not really deal with a headmaster, and even finding a new school would
presumably have to pass through the Master (the critics' accusations that she does nothing ignore
these social features in relation to the specific unreasonable demand by the employer). The split of
the two masters emphasizes the split injunction: `the Master' (in Mrs. Grose's terminology, which
the governess accepts when in conversation with her) and the headmaster; to tackle the second she
must bother the first ("Basic" 176).

A number of critics--Huntley and Bontly, for example--have emphasized the ways in which Miss
Jessel and/or Peter Quint mirror the governess, their relationship mirrors the governess's
relationship with the employer, or Miles mirrors the employer, etc. Brooke-Rose points out many
additional examples--too many to enumerate here. As a representative example, consider her
discussion of the "inside-outside" and "horizontal-vertical" pairings.

Both apparitions...first appear outside (on the tower, by the lake), but even here there is a
disjunction: Quint is seen from the grounds but on the tower (horizontal frontier between out and
in), Miss Jessel completely outside. Quint will appear inside the house only once (on the stairs), but
twice at the window (vertical frontier between out and in). Miss Jessel, who is closer to the
governess's own identity, will appear first outside, twice inside (the stairs, the schoolroom), and
lastly outside again ("Basic" 163).

Moreover, the figures are distorted--Quint seen only from the waist up and described "in a detail
which verges on the absurd" and Jessel "described only in the vaguest terms, convenient to the
situation, conventional in any ghost story" ("Basic" 163). These distortions, says Brooke-Rose, are
suggestive of reflections in a mirror.

What do we see in a mirror? Idealized or ugly reflections, according to our emotional needs and
physical states, according to the light, the quality of the mirror; parts of ourselves or ourselves
whole (but never in the round), from different angles and at different distances according to the
position of the mirror, and in any case always reversed, never as others see us ("Basic" 164).

But the events are embedded in a mirror structure in still another way. "A mirror," says Brooke-
Rose, "not only distorts, it frames, and a frame is normally four-sided. And the figure four literally
[sic] frames the text." Brooke-Rose presents "a quadripartite structure of mathematical precision";
within each group the four elements are "cross-linked" in three binary patterns of reflecting pairs.
There are six groups of four: "four main living characters at Bly...: the governess, Mrs. Grose,
Miles, Flora" (in one of the "cross-linkings" the governess and Mrs. Grose are paired with Miles
and Flora); "four ex-guardians (all failing in some way): the uncle, Mrs. Grose, Quint, Miss Jessel"
(in one of the "cross-linkings" the uncle and Mrs. Grose, who are alive, are paired with Quint and
Jessel, who are dead); "four presently concerned with the children: the governess, Mrs. Grose,
Quint, Jessel"; "four in a supposed evil relationship: Quint, Miss Jessel, Miles, Flora" (in one
"cross-linking" Quint and Jessel are paired with Miles and Flora--in another, Quint and Miles are
paired with Jessel and Flora); four narrators--Griffin and Douglas, the I-narrator, and the governess;
"four readers or receptors of the story": Douglas, the I-narrator, the other listeners at Douglas's
country home, and the readers of the novella (in one "cross-linking" Douglas and the I-narrator are
paired with "the others and us"--in another "Douglas and his listeners" are paired with "the I-
narrator and us") ("Basic" 172-173).

It is easy to see how the "bare structure" and the framing "mirror structure" support both fabulas--
the apparitionist and non-apparitionist readings of the story. The "bare structure"--injunction,
transgression, denial--is compatible with bothhypotheses: `the elaborate machinery' she sets in
motion to `attract his attention' applies equally to hallucinations and to ghosts as evil pre-existent
but not normally visible except to the predisposed. For it is never mentioned that from the ghosts'
viewpoint in the governess's notion of their intentions, her ability to see them is a nuisance except,
if this were a banal story, to frighten her away; indeed, in her own notion of their capacity, there is
a time when her eyes are sealed to their supposedly continued visitations. A less complex story
would provide a different motivation in which the ghosts would want to be seen by the main
character. In this way they ought not to want this, but she needs to be in the picture, not only as
saviour in the drama produced, but also to be looked at, outside the picture as voyeur of the
communication between the ghosts and the children, inside the picture as screen between them
("Basic" 183-184).

Similarly, the mirror structure is a system of inversion and variation that correspond to the psychic
structure of projection (hypersensitivity to and identification with external phenomena for the
supernatural hypothesis, hallucination for the natural hypothesis) ("Surface" 225).

Brooke-Rose divides surface structures into "Surface Structure A (SS.A.)" and Surface Structure B
(SS.B)."

The former is "the presentation of events," while the latter is the sequences of words we read....In
other words, what used to be called `structure' and `texture' would be two different levels of the
surface structure. The `abstract structure' or abstract formula would then be what some would call
the `deep structure', and what I prefer to call the underlying or bare structure ("Surface" 189-190).

Although both fabulas are contained in the "bare structure" and in the SS.A. as it is "framed" by the
"mirror structure," the actual ambiguity--the Todorovian "hesitation" (Rimmon 118) between
natural and supernatural interpretations--occurs, says Brooke-Rose, in the interaction between
SS.B. and SS.A--in linguistic ambiguities in the presentations of the I-narrator, Douglas, and the
governess. We cannot here present a thorough restatement of Brooke-Rose's position, but we will
summarize some representative findings exemplifying the type of approach which characterizes her
analysis.

In her first article Brooke-Rose had suggested that the tale involves the reader in itself in a way
analogous to the effect of a contagious neurosis. In her final article, drawing on the theories of
Russian linguist Boris Uspensky, she attempts to demonstrate how, in the tale, a special world is
presented to us, with its own space and time, ideological system and systems of behaviour, to
which we are, in our first perception of it, in the position of an external spectator, but into which we
enter, accustoming ourselves to it, and gradually perceiving it from within, assuming a point of
view internal to the work ("Surface" 191).

Uspensky, in a passage quoted by Brooke-Rose, had asserted that this "transition" is effected by a
definite alternation between description structured from within and description structured from
without and the transitions between them (qtd. in Brooke-Rose "Surface" 191).

One of the most important of these "alternations," according to Brooke-Rose, is that between
"text"--direct statements--and "metatext"--"which indirectly tells the things the narrator does not
state directly" ("Surface" 191). Another is the distinction between "narrator's metatext (NM)" and
"author's metatext (AM)." "Since the two metatexts share, on the whole, the same elements, there
will be instances when it is not easy to decide whether the metatext is AM or NM" ("Surface" 191).
Related to "metatext" are other instances of "metalanguage"--for example, "direct comment," which
occurs whenever the narrator tells us something about himself/herself which, in a third-person
narrative, would be said by the author or another narrator....In narrative this metalanguage is
usually an ideological or at any rate moral judgment, made by the narrator upon him/herself as
character: in doing so I was selfish, brave, mad, etc. It is, of course, denotated, and as such part of
the narrative which tells of a selfish/brave/ mad person, but inevitably also implies a certain
distance, not merely of the character with regard to him/herself at the time (synchronic) but of the
author later in time (retrospective), who `knows' (fictionally) how it all developed and whose
judgment is in theory (and fictionally) more objective but who also, and this is important, rehandles
his or her material in the light of that judgment, just as an author does. Thus, there are two levels:
internal to the fiction (at the time) and external (later) ("Surface" 196).

Another "alternation" is the distinction between "statement and...utterance...a distinct difference

between sentences that state and sentences that qualify" ("Surface" 209).

The following are a few examples of Brooke-Rose's observations about linguistic surface structures
in The Turn of the Screw.

Author's metatext, says Brooke-Rose, reveals, in the first chapter of the governess's narrative, the
governess's "tendency to exteriorization"--by virtue of the fact that she employs "impersonal
constructions for notions, perceptions, and feelings: `There came to me thus a bewilderment of
vision'" (193). Similarly, in the governess's statement "`I found all my doubts bristle again,'"
Brooke-Rose detects an authorial metatextual implication that, for the governess, "doubts are
autonomous, animate, and animal" (193). "She projects her own impressions," says Brooke-Rose,
in the following statement: "`She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen, and I afterwards
wondered why my employer hadn't made more of a point to me of this'....Why should he?" asks
Brooke-Rose ("Surface" 193). Similar metatextual statements occur in the following instances:

Noun and verb phrases emphasize a split personality: `Agitation...had held me and driven me';...her
possessiveness is betrayed...by an occasional possessive slightly out of place: `my document'...for
the letter from the headmaster to the employer, `my children'...`my boy'...the use of give, offer,
take, have, bring out, put before, for `tell'...which suggests that she regards information as a
possession, an object: `the truth as I gave it to her...'; and a tendency to fuse the other with herself in
an occasional odd use of we or our for I or my or even the: `our distance' [between Quint and
herself...]...`in our prodigious experience' [her and Mrs. Grose's, but in fact hers...]...`for recurrence
[of ghosts] we took for granted'...`what it was least possible to get rid of was the cruel idea that,
whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora saw more....Such things naturally left on the surface...a chill
that we felt, and we had all three, with repetition, got into such splendid training that we went, each
time, to mark the close of the incident, almost automatically through the very same movements' [it
is her assumption that they see, or feel, anything, or indirectly deny it with `loud demonstrations']
("Surface" 194-195).

This "tendency to exteriorize inner feelings," says Brooke-Rose, is "obviously important in both
hypotheses--ghosts or hallucinations..." ("Surface" 192).

"Direct comment" is a form of "narrator's metatext." This occurs sometimes in conjunction with
"narrative instance"--in which "the narrator speaks in the present tense as she relates" ("Surface"
196). Direct comment is "internal to the fiction" because it describes the narrator's reactions "at the
time"; "narrative instance," on the other hand, is "external" since it denotes a "later" reaction--what
the governess thinks as she is writing, not what she thought while she was at Bly. Brooke-Rose lists
a number of examples of such combinations:

In chapter 1, for instance, there is the night sound `I fancied I heard....But these fancies were not
marked enough not to be thrown off, and it is only in the light, or the gloom, I should rather say, of
other and subsequent matters that they now come back to me'....This tells us, on the first level, that
she was fancying sounds, and on the second (still NM), what the AM had already implied, that she
is fanciful. The additional fact that it is immediately followed by narrative instance (the narrator
speaking in the present tense, as she narrates...) further marks the distinction. The chapter also ends
with her fancy of Bly as a castle of romance and then as a great drifting ship....Even when a
narrator adds an adverb to his way of acting or speaking (as an author would), we have the two
levels: `offering it, on the spot, sarcastically'. ...She is being sarcastic/she can be sarcastic
("Surface" 196).

Similarly, we are told that the housekeeper `addressed her greatest solicitude to the sad case
presented by their deputy guardian'.... This denotes what it says (she is a sad case) but also says
`look how objective I am being'. And we may also see an AM on split personality ("Surface" 197).

The governess's account is also, according to Brooke-Rose, replete with "indirect comment," which
"occurs when the narrator describes his or her behaviour but without comment (the reader then
judges)" ("Surface" 202). "The most obvious examples," says Brooke-Rose, are straight
descriptions of her own behaviour, such as over-reaction, especially with regard to the children,
who are not only described in extravagant terms...but who also cause her to behave extravagantly,
even at first, when, after receipt of the letter and her questions to Mrs. Grose, Flora appears....The
governess turns and...`catching my pupil in my arms, covered her with kisses in which there was a
sob of atonement'....We only have to put ourselves in Flora's position to know (if we were in doubt)
that it is over-reaction. There is no direct comment, yet the phrases `covered her with kisses' and `a
sob of atonement' show that the narrator is conscious of over-reaction for the circumstances. In a
third-person narrative it would be AM (or NM with another narrator). Later this consciousness is
expressed in direct comment: `moments when I knew myself to catch them up by an irresistible
impulse and press them to my heart. As soon as I had done so I used to wonder--"What will they
think of that? Doesn't it betray too much?"'...Of course, by then, all is more contextualized and one
could argue that in the light of her beliefs she does not over-react, or that if the children are guilty,
she doesn't, if they are innocent she does, from their viewpoint. ...And her reaction to Flora's first
escapade hovers between indirect and direct comment: `I must have [n.i.] gripped my little girl with
a spasm that, wonderfully, she submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright' ("Surface" 202).

Brooke-Rose also provides numerous examples of mingling statement and utterance, including
"terms of certitude" which, when expressed personally, tend to metatextualize their
opposite: ...`able to asseverate to my friend that I was certain...that I ...at least had not betrayed
myself'; `I felt an instant certainty that Flora had extinguished it'; `It was not, I am as sure to-day as
I was sure then, my mere infernal imagination'; `it was absolutely traceable that they were aware of
my predicament'... ("Surface" 210-211).

"Equally metatextual," says Brooke-Rose, are her apparent lies and "the instances of pseudo-logic
and her curious use of the word `proof', which are more frequent and more insidious than the more
obviously hysterical terms of certitude" ("Surface" 211). These, of course, are compatible also with
an apparitionist interpretation --she could be intuiting mediumistically rather than engaging in
faulty inductive reasoning.

Brooke-Rose's brilliant analysis of the complex linguistic genesis of The Turn of the Screw's all-
pervasive ambiguity should lay to rest interpretations which trace the ambiguity to authorial
incompetence or carelessness--e.g., the interpretation of Samuels. However, such linguistically
based criticism is still in its infancy, so much more work needs to be done along these lines. I am
sure, for example--given the multiplicity of insightful and well-argued interpretations presented
during the course of this dissertation--that there are more than two fabulas implicit in this sjuzvhet.
There may, for example, be real ghosts, but the evil spirits may be appearing to the governess rather
than to the children. Or she may be in unconscious collaboration with the ghosts. Her
phrase--"some sequel to what we had done to Flora"--in the last chapter of her narrative may
represent a fusion of her identity with the identities of ghosts, as West suggests in "The Death of
Miles in `The Turn of the Screw.'" Or the governess's narrative may be an allegorical
communication to Douglas, as Holloway suggests. It remains to be seen whether such linguistically
based criticism can ever account for all the possible fabula or even specify a finite number of valid
interpretations.

Shlomith Rimmon narrows the term "narrative ambiguity" to "the co-existence of mutually
exclusive fabulas in one sjuzvet, a `constructional homonymity' whereby the same surface sjuzvet
derives from exclusively disjunctive fabulas" (41). She finds The Turn of the Screw encompassed
within this definition because of its mutually exclusive fabulas exemplified, respectively, in
apparitionist and non-apparationist interpretations.

Rimmon draws on logic, as well as linguistics, in her discussion of narratives loosely termed
"ambiguous" but not fitting her narrow definition of "ambiguity." In an "ambiguous" text--as
Rimmon defines it--the reader is confronted with two interpretations, which "cannot both be true
and...cannot both be false"--in other words two "contradictories"--as distinguished from, for
example, "contraries," which cannot both be true, though they might both be false....The statements
`All judges are lawyers' and `Some judges are not lawyers' are contradictories because they cannot
both be true and they cannot both be false. On the other hand, the statements `All poets are idlers'
and `No poets are idlers' are contraries because although they cannot both be true, they can both be
false.... Contradictories are both mutually exclusive and exhaustive, while contraries are mutually
exclusive but not exhaustive... (7-8).

Furthermore, there is in the case of ambiguity equal evidence for the truth and falsity of both a and
b. We cannot decide whether a or b is the true proposition and, consequently, which of the two is
the false one. Both possibilities thus remain equitenable and copresent (8-9).

It is easy to see that The Turn of the Screw fits the above definition of an ambiguous narrative:

...(a), It is a story about evil children who secretly communicate with the ghosts of two corrupt
servants but whose souls are saved by the courageous governess who fights the ghosts off (major
statement: `The children communicate with ghosts' or `There are real ghosts at Bly'); (b), It is a
story about a mad governess who has hallucinations and who destroys the children by subjecting
them to her hysterical vagaries about ghosts which they have never seen (major statement: `The
children do not communicate with ghosts' or `There are no ghosts at Bly'). Proposition a, `There are
real ghosts at Bly,' and proposition b, `There are no real ghosts at Bly,' are clearly mutually
exclusive, and yet they can both be equally supported by evidence from the text (10).

The Turn of the Screw, then, like all genuinely ambiguous narratives, is an "impossible situation"--
analogous to pictures studied by Gombrich in which a slight shift of perspective can turn a rabbit
into a duck, an urn into two profiles, a group of white birds flying in one direction into a group of
black birds flying in the other (ix).

These pictures are impossible objects...because they keep our `imitative faculty' constantly busy...
impossible also (and this is the cause of the former difficulty) because they are outside the range of
our experience....In reality, rabbits do not look like ducks, not even with the subtlest shift of
perspective. Nor do the spaces between white birds create the shape of black birds (xi).

Similarly, upon encountering a genuinely ambiguous narrative, we experience an unresolvable

"tension... between the impulse to choose and the arrest of that impulse by the realization of the
equitenability of mutual exclusives" (9)--knowing that, in an analogous life-situation, we would
have to choose between the two alternatives, logic instructing us that only one member of an
exclusive disjunction is true and the other is false (8).

Rimmon seeks to explain how ambiguous narratives--among them The Turn of the Screw--
engender this unresolvable "tension" in the reader, just as Gombrich sought to explain how
ambiguous pictures such as Escher's "Night and Day" cause the mind to vacillate between two
interpretations with no possibility of resolution. The ambiguity is engendered in both cases by "the
omission of unequivocal information" and "the supply of conflicting cues" (x). Therefore, in order
to explain the ambiguity of The Turn of the Screw, the critic will need to specify the "central
permanent gap" (126) in the sjuzvet's information and the "mutually exclusive systems of clues
designed to fill it in" (126). However, Rimmon cautions us that--in an ambiguous narrative, as in an
ambiguous picture of the kind studied by Gombrich-- it will be wrong to think that...every element
yields itself to a double interpretation. Some elements do, like the duck's beak which transforms
itself into the rabbit's ears. Other elements serve only one reading and escape notice in the opposite
interpretation. This is the case of the mouth-spot, prominent when we read rabbit, neglected when
we focus on the duck. As long as the number of such `singly directed' points is equal for both
interpretations, the two remain equally tenable (x).

The "conflicting" and "ambiguous" textual evidence Rimmon cites has been thoroughly discussed
in the course of this dissertation, and we will not here rehash the old familiar arguments. We will
point out, however, the most interesting features of Rimmon's analysis.

The "central gap"--the lack of any objective confirmation or disconfirmation of the governess's
central thesis, that the children are communing with the ghosts--is expressed in a series of
"ancillary or local gaps" (128)--questions such as the contents of the headmaster's letter and
whether or not Flora saw Miss Jessel when the latter appeared for the first time on the other side of
the lake. This leads the reader to see a series of ambiguous "episodes," which he attempts to solve
one by one, rather than the overall pattern of unresolvable ambiguity. Part of the explanation for
this is the relationship between "proairetic" and "hermeneutic" codes in the novella--the former
being "the code in charge of sequences of actions," the latter "the one which regulates the
formulation, delay, and solution of enigmas" (120). Unlike "the ambiguity of `The Lesson of the
Master,'" which is "perceptible only in retrospect" (120), and that of "The Figure in the Carpet,"
which "is perceptible from an early stage of the narrative" (121), the ambiguity of The Turn of the
Screw only begins to be perceptible in chapter six, but this perception leads to a retrospective
awareness of earlier ambiguity. For example, the reader has been led by the prologue to accept the
governess's account--but, in retrospect, Douglas's recommendation may not be trustworthy since he
was in love with the governess and knew her only ten years after the events at Bly. Rimmon
demonstrates how, in episode after episode, "singly directed clues" (129) supporting contradictory
readings alternate successively in "an insoluble clash" (133). Both the governess's and Mrs. Grose's
"wavering" sometimes occur successively in the same episode, but contradictory interpretations by
each character are also "scattered throughout the narrative" (134).

In her discussion of the reader's apperception of ambiguity in "doubly directed clues," Rimmon
points to an interesting circularity in the perception of ambiguity (as of many other governing
principles of literature): on the one hand, it is the details that give rise to the ambiguity and on the
other hand, a recognition of the ambiguity is almost a prerequisite for the perception of many more
ambiguous details (143).

Rimmon makes an interesting distinction between three types of "psychological clues." She defines
a "psychological clue" as "one that indicates a possible explanation of the motives underlying a
character's statement of behavior." She then lists "three different ways" in which "such clues
become doubly directed":

(1) The governess gives a `twist' to a statement, act, or look that the reader is otherwise likely to
take at face value....(2) The reader gives a `twist' to the governess's statement or explanation in a
context which again makes both possibilities equally tenable. (3) The reader himself infers from the
micro-and macro-text two opposed explanations of an unexplained statement or act. The first two
categories are akin to each other, the difference being mainly in perception-direction, depending on
whether a straightforward explanation is implicit in the description itself and is then felt to `twisted'
by the governess, or whether the reader is first aware of a `twisted' explanation and then supplies
the commonsense possibility (138-139).

In her discussion of "linguistic" clues, Rimmon makes largely the same types of points made by
Muriel West in "The Death of Miles in The Turn of the Screw"--citing unclear pronoun references,
as well as "elliptical, vague, or indeterminate constructions" (154-155). Interestingly, however,
Rimmon also makes use of a central difference between spoken and written communication--citing,
for example, the ambiguity of tone...created by the omission of 'stage directions' concerning the
manner in which statements are uttered. Take, for example, the first conversation between the
governess and Mrs. Grose about the stranger....There is no indication of the tone in which Mrs.
Grose replies, and the wording of her answers as well as the framework of the situation admit of
opposed tonal realizations. `I couldn't have come out' may express either admiration for the
governess's courage or disapproval of her rashness (159).

Rimmon's study is an outstanding example of structuralist criticism, drawing on formal logic as

well as scientific linguistics. The main weakness in her study, as in Brooke-Rose-s study, is the
assumption of only two fabulas in the sjuzvhet. The multiplicity of well argued interpretations
would seem to suggest that the work is even more ambiguous than Rimmon realizes.

3. Reader-Response Criticism Employing Archetypal Analysis: Hallab

Like many other critics--Heilman, West, Firebaugh, Grunes, Fryer, and Voegelin, for example--
Mary Y. Hallab discerned a plethora of archetypal figures and themes in the novella. Citing James's
references to fairy tales in the Preface to Volume 12 of the New York Edition, Hallab points out
how fairies, ghosts, demons, witches, and other such beings frequently merge in the popular
imagination. Hallab reminds us also of the narrative "frame which sets [the story] off from
everyday experience" and language reminiscent of fairy tales--for instance, the description of Bly
as "`a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite'" (494).
Hallab points out numerous patterns in the novella which are found frequently in fairy tales:
"...fairies, elves, witches, or revenants steal or try to steal children and carry them off..."; "...the
elfin kidnappers...lurk in and around the house...Miss Jessel appears on a lake, a well-known
entrance to fairyland..."; "...continual kissing or embracing of the children" is "a traditional method
of effecting the disenchantment of an enchanted person"; "...the children come more and more
under the influence of the ghosts..." in accordance with "the changeling tradition"; "taboos against
naming supernatural figures...are common"; "the bewitched do not survive the breaking of the
enchantment" (495-496).

Drawing on anthropological scholarship, Hallab relates these tales--and The Turn of the Screw--to
more deeply rooted archetypes, such as "the memory of ancient vegetation cults" and rituals of
sacrifice to the vegetation god....The desire of the ghosts for the children parallels such myths as
that of the kidnapping of Persephone by Pluto and the death of youthful gods such as Adonis,
Osiris, and Dionysus. Flora, as her name indicates, corresponds to the maiden, daughter to the Earth
Mother, Demeter, and the Sky-God, Zeus, who is abducted by the god of the dead while picking
flowers. Miss Jessel is Persephone in her aspect of goddess of the underworld--dark, terrible, tragic.
Miles, who has `something divine' about him, and Quint are their masculine counterparts. Mrs.
Grose and the uncle also occupy archetypal roles. She is the Earth Mother, warm, protective,
accepting. He is a kind of Sky-God, remote, idealized, demanding. They are the `good' or `ideal'
counterparts of the `low' and `evil' Quint and Jessel (498).

Hallab highlights these parallels not to make philosophical points--about feminism, for example, as
does Fryer, or about religion, as do Voegelin, Heilman, or Firebaugh, or about human conflicts as
does Grunes--but to explain the story's powerful effect on the reader. The archetypal analysis is
subordinated to reader-response analysis. The archetypal pattern...in this story has universal appeal
because it has its origin in the human soul; it corresponds to and fulfills certain needs of each
individual reader. The pattern of initiation and rebirth is an experience common to all; almost all
cultures celebrate the transition from childhood to adulthood with some sort of initiation ceremony
suggesting rebirth into a new life. But any change of attitude at any period of life might be
experienced by the individual as a rebirth. On this level, The Turn of the Screw can be seen as the
working out of a personal experience, a conflict within the individual psyche (499).

Hallab suggests that the governess bridges the gap between the tale and the reader, functioning on
one level as the `real' person involved with the Other World. Yet, on another level, she is one with
the other figures, part of the pattern. She is the initiate who participates in the death of the
vegetation god (even helping it along) in order to experience a rebirth, at the same time resisting the
event, mourning the loss (498).

Hallab's identification of the governess as the "real" person who, nevertheless, undergoes the
experience of death and rebirth, along with her contention that the reader responds to these events
because of their applicability to his own context, seems to suggest that the reader is led to identify
with the governess because of the structure of the text. In this respect Hallab's approach is similar to
that of reader-response critics such as Felman, Obuchowski, and MacNaughton discussed in the
preceding section of this chapter. However, the governess, in Hallab's view, is paired with Douglas,
her masculine counterpart, who is probably Miles. Each undergoes a metamorphosis as the events
unfold--Miles becomes "a charming narrator, Douglas,"--and the governess becomes the mature
woman who is praised in the prologue. In each case, therefore, "a mature, integrated personality is
suggested, though not achieved in the story proper" (502)--the narrative, that is, of the events at
Bly. While "Douglas and the governess are in the tale...a part of the pattern," Hallab says, one
person...stands completely outside, between the story and the reader; this is the first narrator, the
unidentified I, whose presence has generally been overlooked....he stands for the single psyche in
which the conflict takes place....He is anonymous because he is the `self' or the whole....He
contains the opposites: male and female, child and adult, witch and devil, god and goddess,
conscious and unconscious, life and death. If the story is an image of anyone's mind, it is his (502).

Interestingly, some critics have assumed this narrator is male, while others have assumed she is
female.

Quint and Jessel, Hallab says, stand for "the animus and anima, the negative side of the parent
imago--the collective unconscious." The governess's rejection of these figures throughout the story,
Hallab maintains, suggests the pattern of a disintegrated personality in conflict with itself, yet
striving toward what Jung calls individuation, toward a rebirth into a fully integrated personality in
which all parts are balanced--child, man, god, and devil. To achieve this goal, the individual must
sacrifice not only childish innocence but also the rigid insistence on the superiority of the conscious
ego characteristic of the emerging personality. He must confront and come to terms with the
archetypes of the collective, and irrational unconscious, recognizing them as an integral part of
himself...the governess, the ego figure, finally achieves fulfillment by breaking her self-imposed
taboo, by acknowledging and naming the ghosts. This active confrontation of the `dark side'--the
anima and the animus--by the conscious implies the death of childhood. Thus, when the governess
names the ghosts, Flora becomes hysterical and `disappears' from the story; Miles dies; at the same
time the ghosts, too, vanish. The personality has experienced a kind of ritual death. The stage is set
for a rebirth of a totally integrated personality in which conscious and unconscious, rational and
irrational, are one (502).

Hallab seems to suggest that the reader's experience includes the unconscious intuition of the
identity and eventual merging of Douglas with Miles and the "early" governess of Bly with the
"late" (both the governess and Miles are dead when the first narrator relates the story) governess of
the prologue. In this respect she is similar to Stepp, discussed in the preceding section of this
chapter.

Although her main concern is to provide a Jungian analysis of the reader's response to the story,
Hallab has, incidentally, offered some interesting speculation concerning the psychogenesis of the
story in the author's unconscious. Citing Edel's observation that, during the nineties, James
"suffered a crisis of depression and despair associated with his attempt and failure to be a
successful playwright" (502), and noting his preoccupation both with ghosts and children during
this period, Hallab suggests that "James, in these tales, took the first steps toward recovery" (503).
Hallab recalls Jung's contention that the child archetype represents potentiality; thus its
appearance...anticipates a future change of personality, especially one in which conscious and
unconscious elements are synthesized, in which opposites are united (503).

Thus, in Hallab's view, The Turn of the Screw arose from and reflects an interior struggle which the
author, so his later canon suggests, successfully resolved.

James's concern with evil, with the perverse, with death, his seeming `regression' to a terrifying
childhood, show his desire to face up to this other side and to come to terms with it. That he
succeeded is evident in the changing quality of the archetypal experience which forms his tales, and
in the change from youthful to adult protagonists. In such later novels as The Wings of the Dove
and The Golden Bowl, evil appears, not in the horrifying and inexorable form of ghosts, nor with
the power and authority of the adult to the helpless child, but as ordinary and forgivable, petty
human weakness--comprehensible, manageable, even at times pathetic. Merton Densher and
Maggie Verver are not terrified or crushed by the experience of evil, but are able to accept it, deal
with it rationally, and thus rise above it (504).

Hallab's article is an outstanding example of Jungian psychoanalytic criticism focusing primarily on

the reader, secondarily on the author. She clearly and convincingly locates in the story "the timeless
and universal patterns which have their prototype in primitive fable and myth" (492).

4. Allen: Narratology Employed to Support a Traditional Interpretation of the Plot

John J. Allen's article may be said to be a throwback to an earlier period. He is arguing, in the
seventies, that the ghosts are real when most critics have either in some way synthesized the
apparitionist and non-apparitionist interpretations or accepted the insoluble ambiguity of the story--
perhaps, like Enck or Krook, finding some philosophical message in the irreducible ambiguity
itself, but more often seeking to explain its effects on the reader or how it is embedded in the
structure of the text.

And most of Allen's arguments are based on a traditional, formalist reading of the plot a la
Goddard. Indeed, Allen seems to deprecate later, more "advanced" approaches, observing that "the
history of its [the novella's] interpretation provides a lesson as to the way in which our theories
draw us away from the examination of the text itself" (73). Allen argues that James intended to
write a ghost story, citing the author's statement in the Preface concerning the governess's
"authority" and arguing that this statement has been misinterpreted by Wilson and others, but bases
his main arguments on the text itself. "This authority," he says, "cannot...simply be conferred on the
governess by James; it must be established in the fiction" (74).

Most of the arguments Allen presents have been presented and debated many times and need not be
discussed in detail yet again. They include but are not limited to the following: "the governess's
description of Peter Quint, Flora's shocking language to Mrs. Grose, and Miles's final `surrender of
the name'" (77)--as well as Flora's refusal to look across the lake when the governess announces the
appearance of Miss Jessel, the candle going out in Miles's room, and Miles's identification of Quint
at the story's end, after the child's "mood" has indicated, according to Allen, that he has not been
briefed by Mrs. Grose and Flora.

Much more interestingly, however, Allen suggests that the narrative structure--in particular, the
three-narrator "frame" of the novella--makes the governess's testimony credible. Allen suggests that
the governess is given credibility by Douglas's good recommendation of her, as well as "the respect
that he accords the manuscript...his reticence about the story," and the fact that "he does not divulge
the governess's name" and that Douglas, in turn, is given authority by the first narrator, the
anonymous guest--in particular, through "the incremental revelation of intimacy and affinity
between the two men." In perhaps the weakest link in his argument, Allen suggests that this
anonymous guest is to be identified with the author's persona and therefore carries the authority of
the author.

Although the `I' of the narrative frame is of course a fictional character, this is only so because of
the fictional situation; that is, he (the real James) wrote the governess's story. The `I' is the `real'
James in fictional garb: he supplies the title within the frame, is perceptive, etc., and is an
uninvolved observer. His judgments and perceptions are accepted by the reader as the real James's
judgments and perceptions, though his knowledge is limited, and he can thus be legitimately
designated the implied James (74).

This is a curious argument. Are the narrators of "The Black Cat" or "The Tell-Tale Heart" reliable
because they constitute the implied Poe? Furthermore, Kevin Murphy has provocatively suggested
that such agreements, between Douglas and the first narrator or between the governess and Mrs.
Grose, "rather than assuring accuracy and definitiveness, produce the opposite effect" (548). All the
characters have their biases--including the first guest, as Kevin Murphy has pointed out--and their
agreements with one another may be shared misunderstandings or failures of communication.
Moreover, as a number of critics--among them Stepp, Hallab, and Lind--have pointed out, the
governess who receives Douglas's praise is a thirty-year-old woman, not the twenty-year-old
governess at Bly. Nevertheless, Allen has performed a service in calling attention to this much
neglected first narrator, whose narrative function and significance needs to be studied in more
detail.

5. Formalities Study of Imagery in The Turn of the Screw: Bengels

Barbara Bengels, by a representative list of examples of imagery related to the word screw, has
attempted to demonstrate how James "weaves most of the major strands of imagery into a seeming
pun in the title itself" and how "in the word screw James virtually reveals every twist of the
novella" (323). Bengels has not studied the imagery in order to ascertain the author's intentions
regarding the interpretation of some aspect of the plot, like Dyson, or to argue for the recognition of
a certain body of philosophical or theological content, like Heilman. Instead, Bengels has sought to
study the pattern of imagery for its own sake--the way an art critic might study a complex pattern of
shapes and colors in a painting--to understand "the way this one key image unifies...diverse strands
of imagery into one complex fabric" (327). Through this fabric, James has suggested the tortuous
twists and subtle ambiguity with which his plot is fabricated.....the ultimate turn of the screw in the
pressure he brings to bear on the reader himself (327).

Bengels recalls Douglas's suggestion that the presence of two children "`gives the effect of another
turn of the screw'":

Here the implied usage would suggest the increase of tension in the story by the added
complication of a second child (and perhaps, even more to the point of the story, the tension created
by a second or more ambiguous reading) (323).

Bengels provides examples of imagery suggesting "the turning of screws to increase pressure, to
extort information as in the medieval torture engines"--noting several instances in which the
governess "pressed" Mrs. Grose or the latter responded to inquiries "under pressure" (323-324).

Bengels also calls attention to certain nineteenth century idioms :

By 1859, the expression `to screw up' meant `to choke or garrotte a person,' certainly supporting the
thesis that the governess actually kills Miles in her attempt to wring from him a confession....One
slang usage equates a screw with a jailer, perhaps because of its association with a skeleton key.
Miles has hinted earlier in the story that the governess has kept him in too close confinement when
he'd rather be off again to school and she, herself, has said, `I was like a gaoler with an eye to
possible surprises and escapes.'... Again in Chapter 24 Peter Quint is compared to a `sentinel before
a prison'...and while Miles is described as `being confined against his will'...the governess is no
longer merely his jailer but `his judge, his executioner' (324).

The word screw, Bengels recalls, was also used to mean "the propeller of a boat," and this usage
ties together a number of images--Bly as a ship with the governess "`strangely at the helm'"; Flora's
"`boat building'" at the time of Miss Jessel's first appearance; the "`depths and possibilities that [the
governess] lacked resolution to sound'"; Mrs. Grose's desire "`to sink the whole subject'"; the image
of Miles, at the final confrontation, "`standing at the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some
faint green twilight'"; Miles's possible innocence, which is "`confounding and bottomless'"; and her
reference to her "`sick swim,'" which suggests that she is "a captain whose boat has sunk" (324-
325).

There are, of course, the sexual implications of the word screw--the governess may kill Miles, at
least partly, because of a sexual attraction for the boy and unrequited love for the employer.
Finally, much imagery related to beasts and hunting is tied together by the word "spring,"
especially in the last chapter. Such imagery begins in the prologue when we are introduced to the
employer, whose home is "`filled with trophies of the chase'" and continues to the end when the
governess "`springs straight upon'" Miles. "As in a real hunt," Bengels reminds us, "it is sometimes
difficult to separate the hunters from the hunted; the hounds and the prey sometimes merge in the
underbrush" (326). Bengels's essay is an excellent specimen of formalistic criticism. She is not,
however, an extreme formalist. Unlike some formalist critics, Bengels is careful to consider words
by the author in their historical context.

Conclusion to Chapter VI

We see in the seventies a continuation of several trends related to the influence of structuralism
which were also present in the sixties: the tendency of many critics to concentrate more on
technique and less on philosophical or thematic content in their analyses of the story, attempting in
many cases to determine ways in which pervasive ambiguity had been engendered by the author--
through a study of the novella's narrative techniques and the effects of such ambiguity on the
reader's experience of the text; an increased awareness of the reader's "participation" in the story, as
determined by the structures of the text; and an increasing tendency to view the world of literature
as an isolated and self-referential universe--a tendency reflected in source studies, attempts to
understand the novella by relating it to the totality of the Jamesian canon, and efforts to understand
the work by relating it to works by other authors in the same or contiguous periods of literary
history--without arguing that one work is the source of another.

Accordingly, Brenda Murphy, Wirth-Nesler, Merivale, Huntley, Felman, Kevin Murphy,

MacNaughton, Obuchowski, Brooke-Rose, and Rimmon all considered the work inherently and
unresolvably ambiguous. Kevin Murphy, MacNaughton, Obuchowski, Brooke-Rose, and Rimmon
sought, in various ways, to understand the textual genesis of the ambiguity. Felman, Kevin
Murphy, MacNaughton--employing reader-response psychoanalytic criticism--explained the
ambiguity by postulating an implied reader forced by the text to repeat the mental operations of a
non-omniscient character. Huntley employed psychoanalytic observations about the governess, as
well as a survey of the Doppelganger motif in other literary works, to explain an ambiguous effect
which Huntley was sure James intended. Brooke-Rose and Rimmon sought to explain the text's all-
pervasive and insoluble ambiguity--the former through the application of scientific linguistics, the
latter through the application of a combination of scientific linguistics and formal logic. Nesler and
Merivale sought to locate the ambiguity within literary history by comparing the novella to other
literary works. And Brenda Murphy used the novella's ambiguity, as reflected in the historical lack
of critical agreement, to make points about epistemology, hermeneutics, and human
communication.

Other critics, even though they offered "interpretations" of the story, were influenced by the
prevailing critical trend toward acceptance of the work's ambiguous nature or syntheses of
apparitionist and non-apparitionist positions in preference to the earlier tendency to argue for one
position as exclusively correct. Thus, Holloway--by interpreting the governess's manuscript as an
allegorical statement directed to Douglas rather than an account of real experiences at Bly--made
the apparitionist/non-apparitionist controversy irrelevant. Stepp's Jungian reader-response approach
did not even address the question of the exact nature of events at Bly.

Sheppard and Lind--by coming to opposite conclusions concerning the apparitionist/non-

apparitionist controversy and basing their arguments on much of the same historical and
biographical evidence--have, perhaps, unwittingly provided additional support for the position that
the novella is inherently and unresolvably ambiguous. And Sheppard, Timms, and Edward Stone
convincingly demolished arguments placing James on one side of the controversy--Sheppard and
Timms the "revision" argument and Stone the "contextual" argument.

But, more importantly, the "interpretations" offered tended to be syntheses of various approaches,
and, consequently, the interpretations were much richer than they would otherwise have been.
Thus, Nardin, Mogen, Grunes, Briggs, and Fryer integrated sociological insights into Freudian or
Jungian readings. Indeed, one of the most important patterns in the seventies is the continuation of
the trend--already prominently in force during the sixties--toward a greater appreciation of the
sociological dimensions of the story, including its Marxist and feminist dimensions.

In addition to the above broadening and deepening of understanding through syntheses of various
approaches, the structuralist influence had three major consequences. The first was an increase in
psychoanalytic reader-response criticism during this period. Felman's study was perhaps the most
thorough synthesis of structuralism and Lacanian reader-response criticism in the history of Turn of
the Screw criticism. Kevin Murphy, MacNaughton, Obuchowski, and Brooke-Rose, in similar
approaches, argued that the structure of the text forces the reader to repeat the mental operations of
the governess--with Brooke-Rose, perhaps most interestingly, attempting to demonstrate how the
novella's linguistic structures make its effects similar to those of a "contagious neurosis" ("`Turn'
and Critics" 156). Huntley psychoanalyzed the governess's projections in order to explain the
reader's response to the text. Stepp linked the ambiguous fusing of the identities of Miles and
Douglas to explain the effect on the reader. Hallab also employed Jungian concepts to account for
the reader's apperception of a new integration of previously repressed and conflicting archetypes
and the attendant deep response to the novella. Grunes and Nardin also sought to explain the
reader's response to the story--the former by examining the response to the "possessed child" motif,
the latter by examining the reader's recognition of an impossibly constricted sociological situation.

Another major consequence was an increased interest in explaining the ambiguity linguistically.
Brooke-Rose's and Rimmon's studies were outstanding examples of this type of criticism, but they
were pioneering efforts; much along these lines remains to be done.

Finally, of course, during this period we see a continuation of the tendency to view the world of
literature as an isolated and self-referential universe. This is reflected in the source studies--
Sheppard's (the most substantial), Purton's, Ryburn's, Tintner's, and Duthie's. It is also seen in the
attempts of critics such as Voegelin, Wirth-Nesler, and Merivale to understand the novella through
comparisons with other literary works without suggesting that the other works are sources for The
Turn of the Screw or that The Turn of the Screw is a source for the other works. Lastly, many
critics during this period sought to understand the novella by viewing it in the context of other
Jamesian works--Sheppard, Huntley, Dyson, Voegelin--to cite a few examples.