Convention and Chaos in The Turn of the Screw

Her tale then describes an adventure in exorcism, meaning not only the getting-rid of her own ghosts but also the elimination of all impediments to a controlling consciousness. Everything is to go, all intrusions upon her creativity. BIy in her telling is indeed remarkably still. The governess prepares for the appearance of Peter Quint by invoking a complete silence: "I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky and the friendly hour lost for the unspeakable minute all its voice." The servants, throughout the action, are present only enough to mark their absence. The governess begins in separation first from her family and then from her employer, the handsome bachelor, and resists requests from both Mrs. Grose and Miles to be in touch with him. That leaves the principals, but as the governess comes to her climax, first Mrs. Grose and Flora are forced by her to remove themselves, and then Miles dies, leaving the governess alone-climax indeed-with a dead boy in her arms.

There can after all be little doubt that the governess invents both her ghosts and their story. She is a palpitating young girl placed by her author in a situation which will invite romantic imaginings with erotic content, which the ghosts will enact. Since the related tale is a first-person account of those imaginings, it does however become a nice question as to what other than the ghosts is imaginary and whether anything, any action not previously vouchsafed in the introductory chapter of The Turn of the Screw, is "real," as in the ordinary conventions of fiction. And to press that question is indeed to discover postmodernist vertigo, of a sort which is indeed fully anticipated in James's fiction, here and elsewhere. The question will become demanding in The Sacred Fount and The Sense of the Past. But it is not yet here quite so obligating. We can find slippages and fractures in the governess's attempts to make her story, and then it is exactly her imposition upon resisting realities, with consequences, that is the story of The Turn of the Screw.

The governess is nothing if not self-absorbed, and that becomes the matter of crucial information about her. We do, that is to say, despite something James says in the Preface, overhear her in "her relation to her own nature." (James's point seems to be that she does not see herself from the outside, but in fact she does, only not objectively.) Arriving at BIy and delighted by the unaccustomed luxury of her new surroundings, in her second paragraph the governess records her looking into the long mirrors and seeing herself, for the first time ever, head to foot, and what follows is in good part an elaboration of the instance. "I was wonderful," she will observe of herself on the occasion when she is first confronted with the problem of what to do about Miles's dismissal from school, and "oh I was grand" she says when, near the end, she lies to Miles about Flora's disappearance from Bly, with many self-approving expressions of her performance in between. At the same time she is a virtuoso valetudinarian, persistently recording her ups and downs. In the first sentence of her tale she confides, "I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong," and what follows is a transcription of the same; that succession of flights and drops is the rhythm of her tale. She is also a persistent insomniac, right from the time of her arrival at Bly and quite prior to the coming of Peter Quint, and that too is a part of her record of herself.