The Turn of the Screw

Henry James’s later works, including The Turn of the Screw, are notoriously resistant to easy interpretation. At one point, James’s own brother William (a distinguished American psychologist) protested that his fiction had become too obscure and advised James to clarify the moral message in his works. Obscurity haunts The Turn of the Screw at every level. The dense, serpentine sentences require careful attention, even scrutiny, or the reader risks becoming lost in the mayhem of disorderly nouns, pronouns, and clauses. While the dialogue between characters is less syntactically complex than the narration, deciphering the significance of what remains unspoken presents challenges. The governess often interrupts Mrs. Grose’s statements and finishes them for her, leaving readers wondering what the housekeeper may have said, given the chance. The exchanges between Miles and the governess are also filled with interruptions, presumptions, and unfinished sentences. There is no relief from uncertainty at the level of plot, either, as debate over the “reality” of the ghosts still rages among readers and seems unresolvable. Finally, the very structure of the novella, which nests one narrative within another, clouds the governess’s original narrative with even more uncertainty and compounds the problem of ambiguity.