The Turn of the Screw (Criticism)

Criticism

Ryan D. Poquette

Poquette holds a bachelor's degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette discusses how the absent employer sets off a chain reaction that triggers the governess's hallucinations in James's novel.

It is very difficult to make an argument about most aspects of The Turn of the Screw without first announcing whether one belongs to the group that views the tale as a ghost story or to the group that feels the governess's ghosts are really hallucinations. This essay will take the latter view as a starting point and discuss the reasons behind the governess's hallucinations. It is her master's curiously absent status, coupled with the governess's unrequited love for him, that drives the young woman to her hallucinations.

When the governess applies for the job at Bly, her employer tells her that there is one binding condition that no other woman has been able to meet: "she should never trouble him — but never, never: neither appeal nor complain nor write about anything." Instead, the governess is to be totally in charge and should "meet all the questions herself take the whole thing over and let him alone." The governess is unsure at first, especially because she knows the position will entail "really great loneliness."

If she had her way, on the other hand, she would be governess in the house of the master himself, on whom both Douglas and the governess imply she has a crush. As Douglas notes in his introduction to the tale, when the governess first meets the master, she notes that he is "a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage." The governess is drawn to him on their first meeting and gives other clues throughout the story that she is pining for a romantic relationship, preferably with him. This feeling is compounded, first of all, by the fact that Bly is her first assignment: "She was young, untried, nervous."

As Leon Edel notes in his article, "The Point of View": "she has ample reason to be nervous about the duties and responsibilities conferred upon her a young girl taking her first job." Even though she is nervous at the thought of the job at Bly, she is also eager to impress her new master, as she notes when she takes her walks alone in the garden: "I was giving pleasure — if he ever thought of it! — to the person to whose pressure I had responded." The governess thinks that she has made her employer happy since she is the only one who has been able to adhere to his guideline of no contact. She starts to congratulate herself immensely: "What I was doing was what he had earnestly hoped and that I could, after all, do it proved even a greater joy than I expected." In fact, the governess starts to fancy herself "a remarkable young woman and took comfort in the faith that this would more publicly appear." In other words, she is hoping that her great deed will attract the master's attention.

It is telling that, in this frame of mind, she starts to have a romantic daydream, "a charming story suddenly to meet someone." Who is this someone? The governess's further description identifies this "someone" as a person who "would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn't ask more than that — I only asked that he should know." The governess is having a romantic daydream, imagining that her master will appear so that she can see his approval "in his handsome face." As Harold C. Goddard notes in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, the absence of the master is having a very real effect on the governess's psyche. Says Goddard, when "a young woman, falls in love and circumstances forbid the normal growth and confession of the passion, the emotion, dammed up, overflows in a psychical experience, a daydream."

However, the daydream that appears before the woman on the tower is not the one she expects — "the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed." Her conscious mind is asking for the appearance of the master so that she can show him how good she is being and perhaps be rewarded. But it is the deeper, subconscious mind, freshly affected from all of her thoughts about how she wants to prove herself to the master, that precipitates the "ghostly" vision. In her mind, the governess is creating a challenge for herself, something that is greater than merely following the master's orders and something that will perhaps yield a greater reward, once the master sees how she has been victorious.

The governess does not realize this, of course, and attributes the vision to the dead ghost of Peter Quint, once she has spoken with Mrs. Grose and gotten this idea in her head. However, Mrs. Grose has already planted other ideas in the governess's head, prior even to the time when the governess sees her first hallucination. Shortly after the governess arrives, she inquires after her predecessor, and Mrs. Grose tells her that "She was also young and pretty — almost as young and pretty, Miss, even as you." The governess notes that "He seems to like us young and pretty!" and it is here that Mrs. Grose slips and mentions a mysterious "he," which the governess notes but then forgets. More important, however, is her subconscious mind, which is recording that fact and adding it to the other strange things it has noticed at Bly — the cryptic death of her predecessor, the sounds she hears at night, the fact that Miles's headmaster has dismissed him. Although she does not think about these things consciously at first, all of these first impressions, coupled with her desire to appear a hero to her employer, help her subconscious to create a suitable challenge.

Once the governess's vision has gotten out of hand and she has whipped everyone into a frenzy, Mrs. Grose suggests contacting their master, an idea that would undercut everything that the governess is trying to accomplish at Bly. She thinks about her master's reaction: "his derision, his amusement, his contempt for the break-down of my resignation at being left alone and for the fine machinery I had set in motion to attract his attention to my slighted charms." The fact that she mentions her "slighted charms" confirms that the governess's intentions with the master are more than professional. In fact, she is so protective of her vision, and of her reputation with her master, that she threatens Mrs. Grose not to send for the master behind her back: "I would leave, on the spot, both him and you."

It is not her love for the master alone that creates the governess's hallucinations. The young woman's tendency for nervousness has already been noted. But she herself indicates that she might be drawn toward something more, under certain circumstances. At one point, while waiting in "stifled suspense" to see the ghosts again, she remarks that if this tense state were to continue for too long, it could turn "to something like madness." Is the governess mad, or does she just have an overactive imagination brought on by unreleased passion? The second case has already been addressed, but the story gives indication that the first may be true. When the children start prying into the governess's background, she notes that they try to dig out the "many particulars of the eccentric nature of my father." Depending upon the meaning James attaches to the word "eccentric," the governess could be saying that her father was insane. Goddard is much more certain of the father's condition. He says that she is "the daughter of a country parson, who, from his daughter's one allusion to him in her story, is of a psychically unbalanced nature; he may, indeed, even have been insane."

If this is the case, then the romantic daydreams about her master may have tapped into some genetic madness that she inherited from her father. In any case, as the story goes on, the governess does start to appear a little crazy. She imagines that the children — under the influence of the ghosts — are plotting against her: "It was not my mere infernal imagination they were aware of my predicament." The governess believes that her tactful but vague allusions to the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel are being deliberately ignored by the children: "so much avoidance could not have been so successfully effected without a great deal of tacit arrangement." In all reality, the children are probably confused as to what the governess is referring, or if they do understand her, they may think her mad, too.

Regardless of what the children think, they suffer as a result of the governess's delusions. She watches them constantly, and on certain occasions, seems ready to give in to a mad rage, as when she thinks Flora is keeping something from her: "At that moment, in the state of my nerves, I absolutely believed she lied." The governess lets the reader know that "if I closed my eyes it was before the dazzle of the three or four possible ways in which I might take this up." In other words, the governess is seeing three or four ways that she can deal with Flora, either to punish her for lying or to beat an answer out of her. The hint of violence is soon made real, when she almost succumbs to one of the visions, which "tempted me with such singular intensity that, to withstand it, I must have gripped my little girl with a spasm that, wonderfully, she submitted to without a cry or a sign of fright." The governess's mental state is rapidly deteriorating, and she can barely constrain herself from doing something harmful to the children. Edel notes that the governess is reading "sinister meanings into everything around her" and suggests that it is the governess's "psychological harassment that in the end leads to Flora's hysteria and Miles's death."

If even one other person were able to verify a ghost sighting, then perhaps this statement could be refuted. The governess gets her chance near the end of the novel, when she sees the ghost of Miss Jessel while she is standing with Mrs. Grose and Flora. The governess is happy that somebody else will be able to testify as to the ghosts' existence: "She was there, and I was justified; she was there, and I was neither cruel nor mad." Unfortunately, Mrs. Grose sees nothing, and as this essay has shown, the governess is cruel and likely mad. She has been cruel to the children with her psychological torture, driving one into hysteria and one into the grave, and she is certainly displaying the signs of one who is mentally deranged. Perhaps when the ghost of Peter Quint disappears at the end of the story, her subconscious mind has declared herself a winner and so banished that particular illusion. She certainly claims triumph for herself, with her exclamations to Miles — "I have you but he has lost you for ever!" However, given her nervous state, she could easily succumb to another hallucination at her next job — if, of course, there is a handsome young gentleman who inspires her subconscious mind to create another challenge.

Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on The Turn of the Screw, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

What Do I Read Next?

• Although James was American-born, he was an Englishman by preference, and many of his stories, including The Turn of the Screw, take place in England. For other ghost stories that take place in England, a good introduction is The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, edited by Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert and published by Oxford University Press (1989). This massive anthology includes forty-two stories, written between 1829 and 1968, from such literary greats as Walter Scott, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, and Edith Wharton.
• One of the most enduring English stories involving ghosts is Charles Dickens's holiday favorite, A Christmas Carol, first published in 1843, concerning the famous three ghosts — The Ghost of Christmas Past, The Ghost of Christmas Present, and The Ghost of Christmas Future, along with the ghost of Ebenezer Scrooge's friend, Jacob Marley. Together, the three ghosts warm the frigid heart of Scrooge, who realizes the error of his miserly ways. A current version of the short novel was printed in 1999 and is available from Bantam Classics.
• Voices of Madness, 1683 – 1796, edited by Allan Ingram, collects four texts written in Britain in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All four authors — one woman, three men — were regarded as insane, and their narratives tell of their experiences, including their treatment by others. The book was published by Sutton Publishing in 1997.
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819), Washington Irving's classic tale of American horror, features a timid teacher, Ichabod Crane, who encounters The Headless Horseman, a spooky ghost in the backwoods of rural New York. The story is available in a 1999 edition from Penguin USA.
• Like The Turn of the Screw, which was written a year later, James's What Maisie Knew (1897) fell into the part of his career when he was experimenting with new writing techniques. In the case of the latter novel, James also creates a sense of ambiguity. In this case, the confusion comes from the thoughts of Maisie Farange, an adolescent girl who witnesses her parents getting divorced and remarrying, and slowly comes to understand the greater moral issues involved in all of these relationships. The book is available in a 1998 edition from Oxford University Press.
• One of the undisputed masters of the supernatural was Edgar Allan Poe, whose chilling tales have delighted readers for ages. In Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems (2001), one can see why. Along with the perennial favorite stories, such as "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Pit and the Pendulum," the collection includes little-known works like "The Angel of the Odd," as well as Poe's famous poem "The Raven."
• Through extensive interviews, research, and documentary photos, Leslie Rule's Coast to Coast Ghosts: True Stories of Hauntings across America, details some of the nation's spookiest locations. Written in a conversational style, Rule's book was published by Andrews McMeel Publishing in 2001.