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Convention and Chaos in The Turn of the Screw
Hudson Review, The, Winter 2007 by Klein, Marcus
A few "facts" are established in the introduction to the governess's tale, which is to say that some elements of the story to come are established, which, being outside of the story, have an authority prior to what is related in the first-person narrative to come. There had been a governess, the youngest daughter of a poor country parson, who, at the age of twenty, not having had any previous experience and seeking employment, had been interviewed by the handsome bachelor in Harley Street, who had had children to dispose of, his orphaned little nephew and niece. It is a matter of considerable emphasis in these introductory pages that in all probability the governess had succumbed to the charms of the splendid bachelor, whose charms also are emphasized, and, it is said, the governess's passion had probably been sharpened by the fact that she was to have seen him only twice. We are to know that it was a stipulation of her employment that the governess was never to trouble the bachelor of Harley Street. We are to know as well that at BIy, to which the governess is dispatched, there had been a housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, an excellent woman, and-a matter of some importance-several other servants: a cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old groom (for an old pony), and an old gardener. Previously, there had been the governess's predecessor, a most respectable person who had done beautifully till her death. There is no mention of a valet.
In the same way that James puts these few facts into play, so then in a manner does the governess, but from her position within the facts. Like Fleda Vetch and like the telegraph girl in In the Cage, and for that matter like a line of James's heroines going back to Catherine Sloper in Washington Square, the governess is a vulnerable young girl who is susceptible to her own fancies. As is not the case with those others, however, we have the governess in first person, without mediation. Furthermore, she is much more fiercely creative than those other girls.
The famous ambiguity (and the density) of The Turn of the Screw is entirely a function of the fact that the governess herself is the author of her tale. Virginia Woolf commented on the silence of The Turn of the Screw, where everything-the twitter of the birds at dawn, the far-away cries of children, faint footsteps in the distance-goes to make for an accumulation of quietness.5 But it is the governess who suppresses the background. BIy does come equipped with a staff of servants, so Douglas has told us, and the governess does refer now and again to the presence of maids and particularly of a servant named Luke, but except for the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, these others have scarcely any presence in the action of the tale-except possibly in one instance, and in that instance they figure as a negation. Near the end of the tale, after Mrs. Grose has left with Flora, the governess protests to Miles that after all they are not alone, "We've the others," but Miles points out correctly that "Yet even though we have them . . . they don't much count," which altogether is to say that fortuitousness and distractions are thus canceled, as the governess seeks to impose the absolute of her own presence.
