Question 1

Are the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw real?

Accepted Answer

This is the central interpretive question of the novella and it has never been definitively resolved. The traditional reading — that the ghosts are real and that the children are possessed or corrupted by them — was challenged in 1934 by Edmund Wilson, who argued in an influential essay that the governess is a sexually repressed young woman who is projecting her own anxieties and desires onto innocent children and that the ghosts exist only in her mind. Subsequent critics have staked out positions across this spectrum, and the text has been shown to support both readings. James himself, in his preface to the novella, emphasized the horror and the reality of the threat to the children, but James was also the most unreliable commentator on his own work. The interpretive ambiguity is now generally considered to be the novella's primary formal achievement and the source of its continued power.

Question 2

What happened between Quint and Miss Jessel?

Accepted Answer

Mrs. Grose tells the governess that Peter Quint, the valet, and Miss Jessel, the previous governess, had a relationship — Quint was 'much too free' with Miss Jessel — and that both died under circumstances that are not entirely explained. Quint died after a drunken fall on an icy road; Miss Jessel died 'in disgrace' and apparently in poverty after leaving Bly. Exactly what the relationship was, and exactly how it involved the children, is left deliberately vague by James. The governess's interpretation — that Quint and Jessel were having a corrupt affair and corrupted the children as well, and that they are now trying to reclaim the children from beyond the grave — is one possible reading; another is that the vagueness is itself a function of the governess's mental state, and that she is filling in the blanks with her own anxieties.

Question 3

How is The Turn of the Screw related to James's other work?

Accepted Answer

The Turn of the Screw is atypical among James's major works — it is shorter, more plot-driven, and more generically recognizable as horror fiction than novels like The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, or The Wings of the Dove. James wrote it as a contribution to a collection of ghost stories and called it 'a trap for the unwary' — a work designed to produce a sensation of horror in readers who came to it in the right frame of mind. But it shares with his other major work the preoccupation with consciousness and its limits, with what can be known and what must remain unknown, and with the way that the observer's own desires and anxieties shape what they perceive. Edmund Wilson's Freudian reading was, in this sense, very Jamesian — the novella is about the governess's consciousness as much as about the children's corruption.

Question 4

What other works did Henry James write that are similar to The Turn of the Screw?

Accepted Answer

James wrote several other supernatural or quasi-supernatural short works that share The Turn of the Screw's atmosphere of psychological ambiguity. 'The Jolly Corner' (1908) is a story about an expatriate American who returns to his family's New York house and encounters the ghost — or alter ego — of what he would have become if he had stayed in America. 'The Friends of the Friends' (originally 'The Way It Came,' 1896) is a ghost story about a man who sees his mother's apparition on the night of her death and then meets a woman who had a similar experience — told by a narrator whose jealousy may be distorting everything. 'The Beast in the Jungle' (1903) is less overtly supernatural but is about a man who has spent his life waiting for a great experience that will define him and who finally discovers what it was.

The Turn of the Screw Reading Order

Complete The Turn of the Screw Book List