“If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children…“
Perhaps the most famous ghost story of all-time, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw is a deeply unsettling novella that defies simple explanation and invites myriad interpretations from befuddled readers. At the time of writing the story, Henry James was somewhat distraught. His financial success had declined since the publication of Daisy Miller (1878) decades earlier and he was troubled by the deaths of several people close to him, including his sister and close friend Robert Louis Stevenson. He was struggling with poor health (gout), and he was forced to confront the failure of his recent play “Guy Domville” on the West End Stage. The Atlantic Review, once a prolific publisher of his stories, rejected his latest story “The Pupil” (ironically one of his best). Thus, in order to turn his financial woes around, James turned to writing ghost stories for money (or what he called ‘potboilers’). He was asked to submit a ghost story for Collier’s Weekly. Around the same time, James spoke with Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, who told James a story about diabolical servants at Addington who had corrupted a pair of children; and in death, their apparitions returned to haunt the poor young ones. Using this as inspiration for his latest ‘potboiler,’ James dictated The Turn of the Screw to his secretary. It was published in weekly installments in Collier’s and has since become renowned as James’s finest work (a fact that likely would have shocked the author). Over the past century, The Turn of the Screw has been adapted countless times to film, radio, opera, and theatrical performances.
The novella opens with a late-Victorian Dickensian scene as a group of friends are seated around a fire hearth on Christas Eve telling ghost stories. They have just told a “gruesome” story about “Griffin’s ghost” the haunting of a sleeping boy with his mother. The main figure in this opening sequence is a man named Douglas who has announced that he can increase the effect of ‘the turn of the screw’ by telling a true ghost story about –not one—but two children, thereby increasing the terror. In this case, the reference to the title “The Turn of the Screw” is a reference to medieval torture methods, with each turn of the screw comes increasing pain and horror (there are two moments in the novella in which the title is explicitly referenced, the second instance refers to ‘the turn of the screw’ with respect to human virtue so as to combat dark specters). The group responds to Douglas’s proposed story with general enthusiasm, so he announces they must wait a few days because his story is documented on a handwritten note which he keeps under lock and key. He must send for it in London.
When at last the document arrives, Douglas explains that many years ago, a young twenty-year-old woman, the youngest daughter of a parson, freshly done with her education (who remains unnamed throughout the story) handwrote the manuscript by hand. She died twenty years ago now, and sent the pages to Douglas to keep. She was ten years older than Douglas, serving as his sister’s governess, and Douglas apparently fell in love with her. She had answered an advertisement for a job with an unnamed wealthy gentleman-bachelor on Harley Street in London who quickly whisks her off to his remote country manor, known as Bly (“an old family place in Essex”) to work as the governess for two young children, his niece and nephew, whose parents died in India and left him guardian two years prior. Since this young woman is clearly infatuated with the gentleman and seeks to impress him, she accepts the role. But his one stipulation is that she not communicate with him; she must handle all the needs of the children and the household by herself.
Notably, our anonymous narrator mentions that the subsequent manuscript, which is read aloud by Douglas, has been made into a transcript by our anonymous narrator. Therefore, we are removed at several levels from the story –the governess (now dead twenty years) who wrote her account some time after it occurred, the faded papers in a red gilded-edge booklet which Douglas has in his possession and reads on January 4th (four evenings after Christmas Eve), and the words which are later compiled into a separate manuscript by our anonymous narrator. This Gothic “found document” trope has a long history throughout the great works of 19th century literature, however this deliberate obfuscation of the true narrator in The Turn of the Screw is a technique with a lengthy literary history, found among many classic works ranging from Plato to Cervantes.
At any rate, the unnamed governess travels to Bly, the surprisingly ornate, beautiful country estate, where she meets the religious, poorly-educated housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, as well as the lovely, angelic, golden-haired young girl, Flora.
“I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of storybooks and fairy-tales. Wasn’t it just a story-book over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!” (352).
The governess then meets the “little gentleman” named Miles who is being dispatched to Bly from boarding school after being expelled for mysterious reasons. Is he a “bad” child? What did Miles do to get him expelled from school? Maddeningly, answers are never given in the story as we are left to merely speculate. This but one of many questions that are left in a lurid state of ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw.
As the weeks pass, the governess goes for a walk in the early evening (during her personal hour) and is struck when she suddenly spots a strange man far above atop the tower at Bly. “I can hear again, as I write, hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped caving in the golden sky and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no other change in nature, unless it were a change that I saw with a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in the air, and the man who looked at me over the battlements was as definite as a picture in a frame.” This is a terrifying moment for a lone woman living at a remote estate, and in an amazing admission of self-awareness, she alludes to the works of Ann Radcliffe and Charlotte Brontë –“Was there a ‘secret’ at Bly – a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?” (361). She later spots another apparition of the same terrifying red-haired man peering in the through the window.
“He remained but a few seconds – long enough to convince me he also saw and recognized; but it was as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always. Something, however, happened this time that had not happened before; his stare into my face, through the glass, across the room, was as deep and hard as then, but it quitted me for a moment during which I could still watch it, see it fix successively several other things. On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there. He had come for someone else” (365).
Mrs. Grose explains to the governess that there was a man named Peter Quint at Bly, hired to be the master’s valet before the master “went away” and sometime later Quint died of a head wound under mysterious circumstances walking along the icy road from the village to Bly. But Mrs. Grose recalls that Quint was a very “bad” man indeed who was always scheming, with “strange passages” and “secret disorders.” He arrived last year and never wore a hat (he was not a gentleman), and he was often left alone “when the master went” wherein he had a penchant for spoiling Miles. Mrs. Grose notes that “Quint was much too free” –perhaps this is an allusion to an unspoken sexual or psychological abuse Quint inflicted upon Miles. The British penchant for politeness and lack of frankness makes this an even more unsettling tale as Mrs Grose keeps things holds back critical details out of “timidity and modesty and delicacy.” Though she does say that Quint was “clever” and “deep” and that the master believed in him, since he was not well and the country air was supposed to be good for him. Mrs. Grose claims she knew Peter Quint was a bad man but that the master didn’t. The governess comes to believe the ghost of Peter Quint is trying to get to Miles.
Later, while playing at the lake with Flora, the governess looks up to shockingly spot another horrifying apparition at the far end of the water’s edge –“a figure of quite as unmistakable horror and evil: a woman in black, pale and dreadful – with such an air also, and such a face! – on the other side of the lake.” Mrs. Grose later identifies this woman as Ms. Jessel, an infamous woman who was the former governess. She was a “lady” and Peter Quint was a “hound.” They were lovers and Ms. Jessel allowed Quint to do as he pleased with the boy. She later died under mysterious circumstances.
The governess believes her new role is to be a “protectress” for the children as she continues to experience unpredictable sightings of the apparitions –including one particularly haunting evening when she is falling asleep reading Henry Fielding’s Amelia and suddenly believes something is in the house. She gently walks the pitch-black hall at night only to come face-to-face with Quint on the stairway, silently staring into each other’s eyes for a few moments:
“I recollect in short that, though I was deeply interested in my author, I found myself, at the turn of a page and with his spell all scattered, looking straight up from him and hard at the door of my room. There was a moment during which I listened, reminded of the faint sense I had had, the first night, of there being something indefinably astir in the house, and noted the soft breath of the open casement just move the half-drawn blind. Then, with all the marks of deliberation that must have seemed magnificent had there been anyone to admire it, I laid down my book, rose to my feet and, taking a candle, went straight out of the room and, from the passage, on which my light made little impression, noiselessly closed and locked the door… I can say neither what determined nor what guided me, but I went straight along the lobby, holding my candle high, till I came within sight of the tall window that presided over the turn of the staircase. At this point I precipitately found myself aware of three things. They were practically simultaneous, yet they had flashes of succession. My candle, under a bold flourish, went out, and I perceived, by the uncovered window, that the yielding dusk of earliest morning rendered it unnecessary. Without it, the next instant, I saw there was someone on the stair. I speak of sequences, but I required no lapse of seconds to stiffen myself for a third encounter with Quint. The apparition had reached the landing half way up was therefore on the spot nearest the window, where, at sight of me, it stopped short and fixed exactly as it had fixed me from the tower and from the garden. He knew me as well as I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight with a glimmer in the high glass and another on the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in our common intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable, dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder of wonders; I reserve this distinction for quite another circumstance: the circumstance that dread had unmistakably quitted me and that there was nothing in me there that didn’t meet and measure him” (389-390).
The children start to behave in a coy, playfully naughty way –stepping out of their beds at night and telling little lies. Miles is spotted illuminated by the moonlight standing still in the courtyard, gazing up at the manor. On another night, from a distance the governess spots Ms. Jessel in a state of woe, head in hands, at the bottom of the staircase. The governess begins to grow suspicious of the children, wondering why Miles never speaks of anything relating to his schooling, and she comes to believe the children are secretly in league with the ghosts. Can the children see the ghosts? Are they possessed? Or are they simply playing a game with their governess? How dishonest are these children? The governess jarringly leaps from embracing the two children as cherubs to believing they are communing demonic phantasms.
After a particularly troubling moment in which Flora escapes by herself across the lake and into an open field, the governess is joined by Mrs. Grose as they retrieve the little girl just as the governess spots the terrifying apparition of Ms. Jessel again at the far end of the lake. She begins shrieking and accusing Flora of lying to her about seeing the ghosts. Flora begins wailing and Mrs. Grose says she cannot see any ghost across the lake. From here, Mrs. Grose takes Flora back to her uncle, briefly and somberly reflecting that Flora has echoed certain “horrors” to her. Now, Mrs. Grose –an illiterate, superstitious woman—believes the governess’s strange visions.
In the end, the governess confronts Miles while they are alone about what he did to get expelled. He seems confused and offers only vague, cryptic remarks about he simply said certain things (what things?) to other students that he “liked” but they echoed those same things back to the masters. But just as they begin to speak about it, the governess spots the “white face of damnation” peering in through the window, Peter Quint. She yells at the ghost as she protects Miles. He asks if it is “she” (perhaps referring to his sister Flora) as the governess continues to shout that it is not “she” (by this she refers to Ms. Jessel) to which Miles asks: “It’s he?” And by “he” Miels says, “Peter Quint—you devil!” The governess quickly turns him around so that he might see the ghost before she embraces the poor boy with a passion. But then, realizing they are alone with the quiet of the day, the governess realizes Miles’s heart has stopped.
********
The central question in The Turn of the Screw might rightly be: Are the ghosts real? Or is the unnamed governess merely a hysterical madwoman? If the latter is true, throughout the story she has slowly traumatized a pair of unwitting children and we might feel deeply unsettled by this (note that throughout the novella, we are given brief references to the governess’s life, including “disturbing” letters she receives from home about things that are apparently not going well, a few references to her siblings, and one mention of her “eccentric” parson father. Perhaps this lends credibility to psychoanalytic interpretations of the story in which the ghosts are interpreted as mere hallucinations, the result of trauma and repression). But if the former is true, we might likewise feel deeply unsettled by the prospect that otherworldly beings can freely haunt this world and torment the living for reasons unknown. Neither answer to this question removes the horror of this ghost story. In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James places readers squarely in the jury’s chair, beckoning us to decide the fate of the governess –whether we agree with Truman Capote that the ghosts are in fact real, or Edmund Wilson who claimed that the governess is actually mad. However, rather than attempting to defend one side or the other on the ghosts’ validity, more broadly, perhaps we might be better served asking what effect this lack of clarity has on the reader. In many ways, the deliberate ambiguity of The Turn of the Screw is the most horrifying and unsettling aspect of the novella writ large. When it comes to stories, we typically tend to feel reassured as we are safely held within the bounds of a reasonable journey that we know will conclude with a satisfying ending, consoling us that life is indeed reasonable and predictable; understandable and explainable. But instead, The Turn of the Screw leaves us in a state of complete bewilderment –Is the governess a reliable narrator? Is Douglas? Is the framing anonymous narrator? And who exactly is Douglas? Is it possible to interpret him as the same wealthy gentleman who hired the governess? Why was Miles expelled from school? What “horrors” did Flora tell Mrs. Grose about? What did Peter Quint and Ms. Jessel do to the children? How did they die? Why are their ghosts haunting Bly? What do they want? Do the children see the ghosts? If so, why do they lie about it? If not, why do they behave so strangely, always sneaking out of their beds and wandering the manor grounds? And why does Miles die in the end?
The Turn of the Screw brilliantly employs classic horror tropes as a pair of malevolent ghosts encroach upon a claustrophobic house and a lone woman is increasingly isolated by unexplainable forces, with only a poorly-educated, gullible woman for comfort. She is also horribly isolated by the repressive late-Victorian culture while trapped in a remote country estate –she is under the rule of a distant master who doesn’t like “tale-bearing” and despises “complaints” though she deeply wishes to impress him. And in this repressive culture no one ever actually says what they mean. Characters speak in vague euphemisms, often beating around the bush, and avoiding confrontation or conflict. The most terrifying parts of The Turn of the Screw are the ambiguous things that are left unsaid. As Stephen King once said The Turn of the Screw is a story about “secrets best left untold and things best left unsaid.”
James, Henry. “The Turn of the Screw” as found in Henry James: Collected Stories Volume 2. Everyman’s Library, a division of Penguin Random House, New York and London, 2000 (story originally published in 1898). I also listened to a wonderfully spooky audiobook reading of this classic tale.
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