The Turn of the Screw

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Turn of the Screw, The, story by Henry James, published in 1898. The ambiguities of the tale have led to a large body of interpretations, particularly Freudian and anti‐Freudian analyses, of which the best known is Edmund Wilson's in The Triple Thinkers, itself twice revised. The story was dramatized by William Archibald as The Innocents (1950) and Benjamin Britten created an operatic version under the original title in 1954.

This mysterious tale of ghastly apparitions is recounted from the diary of a neurotic spinster who in her youth was a governess on a lonely British estate. Her unusually beautiful and precocious pupils, the children Miles and Flora, are subjected, she believes, respectively to the evil influence of two ghosts: Peter Quint, once a valet on the estate, and Miss Jessel, their former governess. The frustrated new governess, infatuated by the children and particularly by the boy, pits her will against that of the ghosts, for these specters, she believes, morally dominate the children and have an evil relationship with them. She justifies her belief by winning the housekeeper to her cause, although this kindly, simple woman never sees the apparitions. Fearing to report the untoward events to her employer, the children's uncle, for whom she entertains an unrealized and thwarted passion, the governess attempts to exorcise the malicious influences by directly challenging Flora, whose resultant fear is so great she cannot again face the governess. A similarly impassioned attack on Miles results in his death in the arms of the governess, who thought she was saving his life from a demon.

Turn of the Screw, The, a ghost story by H. James, published 1898.

The narrator is a young governess, sent off to a country house, Bly, to take charge of two orphaned children. She has been engaged by their uncle, a handsome man to whom she feels attracted. She finds a pleasant house and a comfortable housekeeper, Mrs Grose, while the children, Miles and Flora, are unusually beautiful and charming. But she soon begins to feel the presence of intense evil, and sees the figure of the ex-valet Peter Quint and that of her own predecessor Miss Jessel. In fact they are both dead, and she learns of the guilty liaison that existed between them. She becomes convinced that, despite their denials, Miles and Flora are communicating with them. These terrible figures have returned to draw the children into their web of sin and evil, and the governess is determined to exorcize them. After a dramatic scene by the pond, where the narrator believes that Flora is meeting Miss Jessel, the little girl is taken off to safety by the housekeeper, and Miles, left with the governess, dies in her arms as she battles for his soul with the apparition of Peter Quint. It is left to the reader to decide whether these ghosts exist for anyone else in the story, or whether they are simply the hysterical fantasies of the young governess. James himself described this story as ‘a trap for the unwary’.