Convention and Chaos in The Turn of the Screw

"The thing had for me," said James further, "the immense merit of allowing the imagination absolute freedom of hand," leading to "my impression of the dreadful, my designed horror." He was insistent that what he had made was "a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, or cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught," particularly, considering that it was a ghost story, to catch those who were "the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious." And in the time immediately following publication of the tale, he was saying much the same to correspondents. "As regards a presentation of things so fantastic as in that wanton little Tale," he was writing, "I can only rather blush to see real substance read into them." (The correspondent, Dr. Louis WaIdstein, whose own letter is not extant, seems to have been concerned for the preservation of the innocence of little Miles and Flora.) To H. G. Wells James was writing that "the thing is essentially a pot-boiler and a jeu d'esprit." To another correspondent, Frederic Myers, he was saying, again, that "The T. Of the S. is a very mechanical matter ... a merely pictorial subject & rather a shameless pot-boiler."

While, however, the tale had allowed James freedom from linkages to history, society, culture, and, as well, from the "copious psychical record of cases of apparitions," there were other and deliberately invoked constraints, which did clearly figure for him.

Several pages of the Preface are given to distinction between ghost stories and fairy tales and then to distinctions between types of fairy tales. Peter Quint and Missjessel were not "ghosts" at all "as we now know the ghost," James said, but goblins, elves, imps, of the sort of "fairies of the legendary order." The Turn of the Screw was an adjustment between the orders of Cinderella and Blue-Beard on the one hand and the Arabian Nights on the other. Cinderella and Blue-Beard and their like were marked by compactness of anecdote, while the tales of the Arabian Nights were long and loose and copious and endless. In The Turn of the Screw, James had aimed, so he said, at the free working of imagination but within bounds so as to achieve an "absolute singleness, clearness and roundness," and he considered that he had succeeded. The tale, he said, "is an excursion into chaos while remaining, like Blue-Beard and Cinderella, but an anecdote."

All of this was to say, by way as it were of ground rules, that The Turn of the Screw alluded to conventions of storytelling, that it invoked certain and ancient genres, in which the author had found a field for play. Against accepted literary conventions, or, better, against accepted conventions of reading, he had made a fairy tale not for children but specifically a ghost story intended to capture "the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious." BlueBeard and Cinderella are no doubt also replete with sexual innuendo and otherwise propose horrors, so James might also have said, but not (perhaps paradoxically) for the jaded.