"The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James

Many consider The Turn of the Screw by Henry James to be one of the best, if not the best, ghost stories. The novella was first serialized by Collier’s Magazine in 1898; reading it today is to read a classic gothic horror story. James, apparently, needed money, and he deliberately wrote a story he was confident would sell. It did. And it did more than sell. 

The Turn of the Screw influenced Joseph Conrad when he wrote The Heart of Darkness. Numerous movies based on the story have been made. It inspired Benjamin Britten to write an opera. And the story has been told and remade over and over again by many authors, including Joyce Carol Oates. 

 

The novella is a kind of story-within-a-story. A group of people celebrating Christmas Eve in an old house are talking about ghost stories. One, a man known only to the reader by his first name, Douglas, says that he has a manuscript given to him some 20 years previously by a woman when she died. The others convince Douglas to send to his home to get it, and it arrives the next evening. 

 

Douglas begins to read the story which begins straightforwardly enough. A young woman is engaged to be a governess to a niece and nephew left in the charge of their uncle, their parents having died in India. The boy is usually at school; his sister lives at the uncle’s country home, called The Bly. The man sets one unusual requirement: the new governess is not to contact him about the children, for any reason whatsoever. She travels to the home, which is quite large, old, and rebuilt and added onto many times.

 

Henry James

The first problem is that a letter arrives from the boy’s school; he’s being “sent down,” or expelled. The cause isn’t specified. After meeting the boy, the governess can’t imagine what might have happened, and she decides to ignore it, for the time being. The second problem is that she begins to see a man around the house, looking in a window from outside or near the house itself. When she describes the man to the cook, the cook is shocked. It is the description of a particularly nasty valet who once worked there. The problem is that the man is dead. Not too long after, a second person is spotted, that of a woman, the former governess, who also had died. And what the governess comes to realize is that the two apparitions want the children.

 

Or do they? Could it be a case of the governess having an overactive imagination? Is she possibly suffering from a mental illness? 

 

James (1843-1916) is considered as having been one of the best novelists writing in English His works include The Ambassadors, Portrait of a Lady, Wings of the Dove, Daisy Miller, The Bostonians, and Washington Square, and he published numerous short stories, novellas, plays, biographies, and criticism. Critics point to James as the transition between the Realist School and Modernism.

 

The word most frequently used in describing The Turn of the Screw is “ambiguity.” A major reason the story leaves so many readers unsettled is that it never really answers the question of ghosts versus madness. But that is its genius; it is a horror story regardless of which interpretation is accepted.