The Corruption of Innocence and the Mad Governess: Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw"

This week for my American Gothic class I have been reading Henry James' chilling ghost tale The Turn of the Screw.

James' screw turns around the themes of innocence, corruption and madness. 

Probably the most famous of all his novels, The Turn of the Screw was written in 1898 and was a departure from James' usual genre. 

Although classed as 'American Gothic', the novel is set at a country estate in England- the fictional Bly- allowing James- an American who spent the majority of his life in England- to write into the European gothic tradition of haunted castles and damsels in distress. Bly, described as a "great drifting ship", is an old manor house set in vast grounds with winding turrets.

The story is told through the use of a framing device, where the unnamed narrator listens to a manuscript read to him by a man called Douglass. The manuscript is the handwritten account of a governess who is employed to look after the orphaned niece and nephew of a "handsome" gentleman known only as the "master" and who must mysteriously never be contacted. The children, Flora and Miles, at first appear to be sweet and docile angels on earth, but soon the governess comes to believe that they have been corrupted by the evil influences of the previous governess, Miss Jessel and her lover, another employee of the estate, Peter Quint. It is suggested that Jessel left her post as governess after falling pregnant with Quint's baby. 

The ghostly element? She's supposedly dead. 

For the remainder of the novel the new governess continually sees the malevolent phantoms of Jessel and Quint around the house and believes they are out to harm her wards. Unable to contact her employer and battling frantically to save the children from harm, her only ally is a Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper.

James does not permit his readers to be passive receptacles of his text. Rather we actively engage with what we read, wanting to know whether the governess' account is reliable (James was a great lover of unreliable narrators, think Daisy Miller), or whether Jessel and Quint are ghosts at all? Perhaps they are mere figments of the governess' overactive imagination- it is questionable as to whether any of the other characters actually see these apparitions. 

Critical response to the novel is vast. The Freudian analysis suggests a psychoanalytical reading that argues the governess' actions are driven by what has previously been repressed in her psyche. Dreaming of a romantic encounter with the children's Uncle, she conjures the ghosts of Jessel and Quint, projecting her guilty desires onto them. In this way, they become the doubles for herself and the master. Thus the ghosts are the governess' hallucinations stemming from what is sexually repressed within herself. Her constant fear that the children are going to be corrupted is a fear that they will be sexually corrupted; she projects her own fears and desires regarding sex onto the children resulting in disastrous conseuquences. Flora is sent away on the verge of hysteria whilst Miles dies at the house. 

Other readings claim that this is a story of pedophilia and that the governess, madly in love with the Uncle, channels her infatuation onto the young Miles and his death comes after she smothers him in a mad fit of passion. 

The novel is also a comment upon the precarious position of the governess at this point in history and reminded me of  Brontë's Jane Eyre. With little other avenues available to them, educated women were often forced into this role and expected to maintain a position of respectability in a society that condemned female passion and sexuality. 

Whether James intended the ghosts to be real or not has long been debated. In my reading I conclude that James combines ghost story and psychological thriller to show us that what is in fact most scary lies within our own overactive imaginations. It is the governess' mind that is haunted and not the castle of Bly. She in turn projects this darkness onto the children.

The success of the story and the reason it has provoked such strong critical attention is because it is ultimately impossible to interpret definitively and it is this that gives it its bloodcurling element. 

I'd like to hear how you interpreted the story...

Also have a look at the BBC adaptation from 2009: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pk76h