Convention and Chaos in The Turn of the Screw

III

This was to be an amusing little thing which would "catch those not easily caught. . . the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious," perhaps the "fastidious" most of all-which was to say that this ghost story was to secure some kind of a belief from readers who were not likely to believe in ghosts. In fact the ghosts do not actually play much of a role. When they are present in the story-the exactly eight times that they are-they are there very briefly, and the most that they do is to stare, and mostly less than that. They do not squeak and gibber. The ghost story quickly gives way in the reader's apprehension to a story about a governess who sees ghosts, which is where the question of belief will be found to reside.

One of James's readers, H. G. Wells, seems to have objected that James had failed to elucidate the governess's own "subjective complications," and in the Preface James would refer to a reproach made by one of his readers, perhaps Wells, that he had not "sufficiently 'characterized'" his young woman, to which he might have replied that the tale is one of characterization entirely. Characterization is what is done to little Miles, too, offered as a more-or-less typical Victorian schoolboy, but that as another turn of the screw. James was not solicited by the charms of children. The governess, as the main event, sequestered as she is in her circumstances and virtually immured as she is in her own mind, is a character so remarkably present as to be a horror. James goes on in the Preface to protest that in the governess "we have surely as much of her own nature as we can swallow in watching it reflect her anxieties and inductions." Which is the case. The snare for that fastidious reader for whom the tale was designed is in the fact that what is offered explicitly as being just a story created from a stock of story conventions, has become indeed, as according to James's own judgment, "an excursion into chaos." Hers, this governess's, is so extreme a case of loneliness, frustration, entrapment, and desire, that this governess-pretty much a typical governess-sees ghosts. It could happen. Might very well. Except perhaps for the extremity, almost inevitable that it would. That's where the credibility is.

And it has been a trick, and that's where the amusement is, but there is more, a leftover terror. The governess has been at the business of imposing a form upon her anxieties and inductions. She has composed her hallucinations into a story, a ghost story, by which her horrors are to be contained, but she has been only almost successful in doing that, and because there have been chinks in her tale allowing the madness to peep out even as it has beckoned, which is to say that because we can know now that we have been seduced into participation in insanity, the abyss opens anew.

1 In 1995, writing what had been intended to be a critical survey, the late Wayne Booth said that he had counted more than five hundred titles of books and articles about The Turn of the Screw, in English alone, before he had got too bored to go on. In Henry James: The Turn of the Screw: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, ed. by Peter G. Beidler (Boston, 1995), p. 163.