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Convention and Chaos in The Turn of the Screw
Hudson Review, The, Winter 2007 by Klein, Marcus
I
Ten years later, in the 1908 Preface to the New York Edition, James insisted once again as he had been saying from the beginning, that it was merely an amusette, this little novel of 1898, readers having seemed one way and another to be taking it seriously. So the ten years earlier, to various correspondents, James had been protesting that like In the Cage, of the same year and of similar length, The Turn of the Screw had been composed for the popular market and for the money. And of course James was right, he would have known. The story had been serialized in a popular magazine, Collier's Weekly. Nevertheless both in the moment and ever since almost everyone has known, James himself after all not excepted, that there was more to it, that this amusement has unaccounted-for and eruptive and surplus energies, that within the well-turned little ghost tale there is deep instability. That the story doesn't really fully contain itself, that it presses for explanation, not to say relief.
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Few other fictions in English, if any, in any event, in modern times, of similar modesty (with respect to the manner in which it offers itself, and with respect to its length), have solicited any greater amount of speculation and scrutiny and unearthing of clues, commentary laid upon commentary upon excursus, so that by now The Turn of the Screw is a kind of continuously aggregating palimpsest of itself.1 And that is the case although almost all of the criticism since the early 1930s has been based on either one of just two premises of interpretation: whether or not the ghosts are "real" or are, rather, the invention of the sexually-repressed governess.
If the ghosts are to be taken to be real, as according to fictive convention, so goes the one way of reading, then perhaps the surplusage of energy in the tale is to be discovered by figuring the tale as moral allegory, with Christian bearing. The governess seeks to protect Innocence, that of the children, against the predatory Evil of the ghosts. She is a savior figure using words like "atonement" and speaking of herself as an "expiatory victim." The founding document is a 1948 essay, "The Turn of the Screw as Poem," by Robert Heilman, who reads symbolically and regards the battle between the governess and the demons as the stuff of a modern morality play.
On the other side, not actually the founding but the most influential document for the "Freudian" reading, as it is usually called, is Edmund Wilson's essay of 1934, "The Ambiguity of Henry James." (A critic, Edna Kenton, had proposed the hallucinating governess a decade earlier.) It proceeds by eliciting secret motives as revealed by careful limning of the plot-but then and therefore encounters a frustration much grappled with in the history of the criticism. After the governess sees her first ghost, the red-headed stranger standing on the tower, she describes him for the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, and Mrs. Grose immediately identifies him as the valet Peter Quint, deceased. If Mrs. Grose is able to identify this ghost, then it must be the case that the governess has not hallucinated and that at least one of the two ghosts is "real," and if so, then it is likely that so will be the other one, the governess's predecessor, Miss Jessel. Edmund Wilson himself twenty-five years later in a postscript to his 1934 essay found a way of getting around the sticking point. He had discovered the answer in an article in American Literature in 1937 in which John Silver had pointed out that just before encountering Quint on the tower, the governess had been talking to people in the village, and it was likely that she would have been given general descriptions of Quint and an account of his death. This, said Wilson, was so clear that it was a wonder that one had missed it.
A great and mostly neglected authority with respect to late James is Theodora Bosanquet. She was James's typist in his late years and was a person of fine literary sense. She would later write a study of Paul Valéry. Better than anyone else, taking dictation as he composed, she would have known the very tenor and rhythm of James's mind along with his sense of his craft, and she was peculiarly privy to his remarks about his own writing. Particularly, in a memoir published in 1924, she would point out that James's late characters often lied. "Most novelists," wrote Miss Bosanquet, "provide some clue to help their readers to distinguish truth from falsehood," but not, necessarily, James. And so in fact it is with the governess; that sticking point in the plot becomes unstuck but is resolved into more interesting complexities. The governess's story occurs as a first-person narrative, but, as will be seen, there are deliberate clues enough in the short tale that what for the reader is to be taken as the givens of plot is for the governess a field for self-serving, and obsessed, invention. Particularly, we are to see that the governess is driven to confirm the reality of her ghosts especially because it might be suspected that they were not real-and James's characters do tell lies whether or not they know that they do.
