"What's your title?" - 'The Turn of the Screw.'

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1993 by Richard Sawyer

"Turn of the screw" is of course a metaphorical expression that signifies an unpleasant or disconcerting turn of events. However, the idiom derives from the torture chamber, where its meaning was all too literal. The "screws" were the grim instruments of torture that jailers (who also came to be known as "screws") applied to the limbs of their captives in order, usually, to extract the appropriate confession. How can such a tainted history of the phrase be related to James's text?

Consider how the governess represents herself. She becomes convinced of her duty to : "save," as she frequently puts it, the children from their possession by the evil specters of Jessel and Quint. The governess casts herself in the role of a confessor who believes that only through a confession of guilt--of collusion--can the children be freed from the harmfull influence of the ghosts. She assumes that the children are guilty and would only lie to her if she questioned them in a frank, open-minded manner. Consequently, she bullies them (and even Mrs. Grose) with accusations, emotional pleas and sarcastic innuendoes. Her tactics and assumptions, in other words, recall those of the religious Inquisitor whose legacy of coercion is evoked in the phrase "the turn of the screw."

Our governess, moreover, is not averse to using harsh means. As she prepares for a final cross-examination of little Miles, for instance, she fancies that "to reach his mind" she may have to "risk the stretch of a stiff arm across his character" (81)--figurative language, to be sure, but in the context implied by the title phrase, ominous indeed. We have previously witnessed the governess's administering a figurative "blow" or applying "pressure" to Mrs. Grose (30, 45) and thus know her to be capable of inflicting such mental anguish. Furthermore, the suggestion that she is now prepared to use such severe measures with Miles immediately follows the third and final allusion to the story title in the narrative.

The governess, in the passage referred to, acknowledges that her upcoming session with the little boy will demand from her a "rigid will," "a push in a direction unusual," "only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue" (80). When it is subsequently revealed, however, that she intends to use such sternness to break down Miles, the irony in her use of the title phrase is surely apparent. The possibility that Miles is innocent and that she may be tormenting him needlessly does occur to the governess at a critical point near the end of her interrogation (87). But she quickly dismisses such misgivings in order to pursue her inquiries to their predetermined and, for her, successful end.

Miles dies, of course, as did many under the screws of the Inquisition, but not before naming the "devil" that torments him (88). (1) Prominent critics who have argued for the "undecidability" of the text include Rimmon, Allon White and Brooke-Rose. Virginia Woolf, however, was perhaps the first reader to admit to being somewhat mystified by the whole tale. While asserting (in the same article quoted at the beginning of the essay) that James's ghosts "have their origin within us," or are psychologically accountable, she concedes that in the case of The Turn of the Screw there appears to be an element to the ghostly manifestation that cannot be accounted for in purely psychological terms. Thus she remains, in the end, undecided about the ultimate origin and degree of objectivity of the ghosts (see Woolf 179-80). (2) For a more detailed classification of the key ways in which a title, in fiction, can be related to the narrative text, see Sawyer 374-88. (3) What follows in the essay is an admittedly oversimplified summary of Booth's fine study of the narrator in fiction in the The Rhetoric of Fiction. His remark on modern titles and epigraphs (see page 198n25) is especially pertinent to my discussion.