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Convention and Chaos in The Turn of the Screw
Hudson Review, The, Winter 2007 by Klein, Marcus
James's late heroines do, moreover, frequendy fantasize. The governess, particularly, is one of a quick trio of lettered but indigent very young Jamesian women. Constrained by their poverty, each of them is teased, just once, by the beckoning of a greater world, by which at the end they will of course be rejected. Each is imprisoned, one way and another, while just beyond is the soliciting glamour, which, for each of them, is intricate with sexual desire, and what is told of each of them is their frustration, which they express by inventing fictions. The governess was preceded by Fleda Vetch, the heroine of The Spoils ofPoynton, die year before, in 1897. In a passage of that text, James refers to Fleda as "the palpitating girl." The epithet applies just as well to the governess. Like Fleda, furthermore, the governess, in charge of two orphaned children, will be cast ironically and impossibly in the role of "a nice old Mummy," as it is said of Fleda. In the time of her story the governess is twenty years old, all but technically a teenager. Just a few months later, in autumn of 1898, the governess will be followed by the unnamed telegraph girl of In the Cage, another tale in which, like Fleda and like the governess, the heroine is effectively imprisoned-Fleda by the poverty of her situation which makes her dependent on Mrs. Gereth, the governess in the remote country house, circumstances having been invented for her so that communication with London will be precluded. And now the telegraph girl who quite literally is in a cage.
Like, it may be added, the character Rose Armiger in James's novel The Other House, published just two years before The Turn of the Screw, the governess will murder a child, perhaps for love. And there is information, or perspective, to be had in noticing, moreover, that this theme of imprisonment combined with frustrated sexual desire is a material for comedy, really for farce, in James's play The Reprobate, of 1891.
What happens is that very nice persons in all of the major fictions of the moment, mostly virginal young girls (who will be still younger in fictions to follow: What Maisie Knew and The Awkward Age) are given their rope and are thereby made available to adventure ranging all the way to horror.2 If the governess hallucinates, that is one kind of a flight of "the winged imagination," a phrase which James uses with respect to the telegraph girl, and at the same time is just one more turn of the screw.
For all of the immense amount of interpretation that has been put upon the litde novel-Christian, "Freudian," more lately "Lacanian," Marxist, gendered, queer, and so on-James's own insistencies obviously, however, are to be considered both first and last, and so it is interesting to determine just what it was that James considered he was cooking up in this potboiler of his, and wherein was the amusement.
What James chiefly recalled when he came to write his Preface to the tale for the New York Edition was the freedom he had experienced in the composition, particularly as he remembered his problems with The Aspern Papers, with its allusion to a real story, having to do with Lord Byron. Unlike The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw had raised no questions for him, or possible objections, on the grounds of historical or cultural realities. It was in this sense that, as he said, The Turn of the Screw was a "perfectly independent and irresponsible little fiction" which for its strength and ease had "a perfect homogeneity." There had been no necessity for considering any kind of outside linkage. He had not found himself responsible even to "ghosts" as in any reality they might be, according to-clearly he was skeptical-"the today so copious psychical record of cases of apparitions." And as for that, these "recorded and attested 'ghosts'" he had found to be too little expressive to be useful for a fiction, "as little expressive, as little responsive, as is consistent with their taking the troubleand an immense trouble they find it, we gather-to appear at all." Real ghosts were tiresome. They didn't seem actually to do anything. "I had to decide in fine," said James, "between having my apparitions correct and having my story 'good.'"
