The Turn of the Screw

(1898)

The Turn of the Screw begins as a ghost story told to friends around a fire. The story is taken from an account written by a young woman who agrees to be a governess for a wealthy man’s young niece and nephew on condition that she not bother the guardian once she takes charge. Her experience proves to be terrifying, as she believes ghosts are trying to possess the children.

The inspiration for this tale was an incident related by the archbishop of Canterbury to Henry James in 1895. The archbishop said he had once heard of two children in a remote place who were in danger of possession by the spirits of two former servants who had been evil in life. The spirits tempted the children to go to them. James wrote later in his notebook, “Note here the ghost-story told me at Addington (evening of Thursday the 10th) by the Archbishop the mere vague undetailed faint sketch of it”. James works this vagueness into his version of the story.

The horror in James’s story results in part from things left unsaid. For example, the relationship between Quint and Miles is described in terms that leave much to the imagination of the reader. Mrs. Gross tells the governess, “It was Quint’s own fancy. To play with him, I mean—to spoil him”. There is only the implication of something extraordinary in their relationship. Apparently Quint and Miles developed “so close an alliance” from being “perpetually together”. And of Quint himself the governess can only imagine in the vaguest terms: “things that man could do. Quint was so clever—he was so deep.... There had been matter in his life, strange passages and perils, secret disorders, vices more than suspected, that would have accounted for a good deal more”. The reader is never to know the precise nature of those passages, perils, and disorders. The vague terminology heightens the terror as the reader is invited to imagine the “badness” or “evil” that may have in fact occurred—if indeed any occurred at all. This is the genius of the story, that so much is left uncertain. The reader dwells, as the governess does, in a world of the imagination.

The vague description that invites the imagination shows itself strikingly as well in the governess’s account of Miles’s misbehavior at school. This description reaches near-maddening dimensions as the reader is left to discern what happened. The only concrete fact is that Miles was sent home prematurely from school. Beyond this we have but the governess’s description of what the school administration says. She tells Mrs. Gross (the reader is, like Mrs. Gross, at the mercy of the extraordinary imagination of the governess), “They [the school administrators] go into no particulars. They simply express their regret that it should be impossible to keep him”.

Then the governess does what will be a hallmark of this story, and what makes this story a psychological thriller. She interprets for the reader and Mrs. Gross the vagueness, or rather the lack of evidence. Lacking any concrete evidence, she not only makes a guess, she makes a statement of great certainty, that the school’s (vague) statement “can have but one meaning, ” that Miles is “an injury to the others”. The danger in the governess’s statements is that they make great sense, and might well be conjectures the reader would make, only with greater certainty. Regardless, the seeds of suspicion have been planted, such that when the issue is revisited later in the story, the reader, like Mrs. Gross, is primed to suspect the worst. Late in the tale, Miles tells the governess about what happened at school. “I said things, ” he reports to her. Again, note the intentional vagueness of the tale. Seeds of suspicion have been planted, but with no concrete evidence. The reader is left, with the guidance of the governess, to piece together what occurred. And the implication leaves us floundering between complete innocence or striking precocity. Miles says that he said “things” only to those he “liked”. What this means the reader is left to imagine. The story’s horror is due in part to leaving so much to the imagination.

The lens through which we see the events is itself problematic. The story is a written account, recorded some years after the supposed events. The governess writes, “I have not seen Bly since the day I left it, and I dare say that to my present older and more informed eyes it would show a very reduced importance”. In addition, this belatedly written account is read to an audience expecting a ghost story. This is a story within a story, the outer story involving several friends who are gathered “round the fire, sufficiently breathless, ” waiting to hear the promised tale that has been written “in old faded ink and in the most beautiful hand” by the governess of the sister of a member of this group of friends. Already removed from the “events” of the story, the narration acquires an aspect of unreliability. Further increasing this remove, the reader is told that the present version of the story is a second transcript “made much later” by the first-person narrator present at the gathering around the fire. Add to all this that the governess to whom the events happened and who recorded them initially is herself an unreliable storyteller. The governess is unreliable because she is by her own admission predisposed to distort the facts of the case with her hyperactive imagination. She writes of her “dreadful liability of impressions”. This would not be cause for alarm for the reader except that the reader is dependent entirely on the governess to receive the events of the story. Typical of James’s finest tales, the story is told through limited omniscience. In this case, the reader never sees into the mind of any resident of Bly except the governess.

The governess’s hyperactive imagination becomes a major theme of the story. Her imagination suffuses the story at the moment she accepts the job, when she imagines herself meeting a difficult challenge with courage and skill. The children’s uncle challenges her by asking her never to contact him about anything. “That she should never trouble him—but never, never: neither appeal nor complain nor write about anything”. The guardian’s request is odd. Odder still is the governess’s response to his request. Even as she begins her drive to Bly, her imagination’s mental landscape overwhelms the narrative: “I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong”. Her perception of Flora is not just of a little child but rather of “the most beautiful child I had ever seen”. She employs adjectives like beatific, radiant, and angelic to render her charge from the guardian extraordinary, for in her mind she is protecting not just children but the best of all children. When the governess intuits that Mrs. Gross will support her in her efforts to protect the children from the terrors of Bly, she feels herself “lifted aloft on a great wave of infatuation and pity”. The governess feels not only emotion, but an excess of emotion, inspired as she is by an imagination that interprets her task as extraordinary.

The governess’s imagination finds its greatest inspiration in the fundamental charge of the uncle never to disturb him. Even after she has determined to protect the children, her focus remains on the uncle: “It was a pleasure at these moments to feel myself tranquil and justified; doubtless perhaps also to reflect that by my discretion, my quiet sense and general high propriety, I was giving pleasure—if he ever thought of it! —to the person to whose pressure I had yielded”. Her imagination drifts always toward this initial charge, the source of her regulation, but also of her greatest pleasure. Her imagination has transformed a wage-earning job into a high commission: “What I was doing was what he had earnestly hoped and directly asked of me, and that I could, after all, do it proved even a greater joy than I had expected”. Always it is her imagining of her assignment that fuels her motivation, rather than the assignment itself.

This perception of her job, that it is a high commission, transforms her from being a protector of Miles and Flora to being their interrogator. After her encounter with the ghost at the lake, the governess says to Mrs. Gross, “I don’t save or shield them! It’s far worse than I dreamed. They’re lost! ”. This shift in role from protector to interrogator—she wants the children to confirm her suspicions about the ghosts—helps to explain why she nearly abandons them at the church. In her frustration about Miles’s contacting his uncle and thus threatening her position, she is driven to abandon her charge altogether. Of course, she does not leave, but she tries to leave. Her foremost concern resides with her imagined perception of her commission from the guardian—essentially that she take charge of everything and remain in complete control. Once this vision is threatened, her impulse to complete her assignment vanishes.

This intensity of imagination, and the resulting unreliability of the narrative, of course help to create a masterful ghost tale. The horror arguably arises more from the governess’s perceptions than from any actual ghost at Bly. James pays homage in his fiction to the powers of the imagination to be used for great good, but also to precipitate great harm. One of the great questions in this tale is where the horror really resides. Quint and Miss Jessel are horrible enough, real or imagined, but the governess herself concedes that she is a source of another and possibly even greater horror. Flora is so terrified of the governess that Mrs. Gross removes her from Bly. Miles is terrified of her, too. Just before his death, the governess thinks, “It was as if he were suddenly afraid of me—which struck me indeed as perhaps the best thing to make him”. Fueled as she is by her imagined calling, she pushes onward. “I was infatuated—I was blind with victory”. For a moment she concedes how much she is implicated in the horror at Bly. “I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his [Miles] being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent what then on earth was I? ”. For but a moment, she steps outside her imagined role and sees that she has been operating from obscurity rather than clarity, concealing herself as a source of potential harm.

And yet facts about the story suggest a horror beyond the imagination of the governess. Miles and Flora appear to be complicit in something, if only in their toying with her on the night she finds Miles outside on the front lawn, with Flora watching him through the window. Then there is the boat that was moved at the lake. Add to that the mysterious relationship between Quint and Miles, and between Mrs. Jessel and Quint, followed by Quint and Jessel’s mysterious demise. And the fact remains that Miles was dismissed from school for something he said to those “he liked”. The nature of that something is left for the reader to imagine. And last, perhaps oddest of all, is the situation in which the governess finds herself: odd indeed that the guardian should insist on the governess’s never contacting him when the situation at Bly has been precarious, even dangerous, with Jessel and Quint at the helm. Thus James creates in Turn of the Screw a tale as horrific as it is strange, where nagging questions remain unanswered except by the reader’s imagination.

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