The Turn of The Screw - Allusions in Literature

Allusions in Literature

• Leon Edel identifies structural and tonal similarities between Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw.
• Joyce Carol Oates' story "The Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly" (featured in the collection Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque) is a retelling of the novel from the point of view of the ghosts.
• In Muriel Spark's The Public Image (1968), the protagonist's husband writes a play to which the protagonist comments, "It resembles 'The Turn of the Screw'."
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance contains a reference to The Turn of the Screw and suggests that it is the governess's belief in ghosts, and not ghosts themselves, which causes Miles's death.
• In Peter Straub's novel Ghost Story, the personal anecdote that Sears James recounts to his fellow storytellers in the Chowder Society is a thinly disguised homage to The Turn of the Screw.
• There is also a modern adaptation of the novel in Toby Litt's "Ghost Story", published in 2004.
• Stephen Beachy's novella Some Phantom is described as a cross between "The Turn of the Screw" and Herk Harvey's film Carnival of Souls.
• In Donald Thomas's novel Sherlock Holmes and the Ghosts of Bly and Other New Adventures of the Great Detective, Holmes investigates the aftermath of the events described in The Turn of the Screw.
• There is a modern adaption of the story in Adele Griffin's "Tighter", published in 2011.
• Seamus Deane's 1996 novel, 'Reading in the Dark' alludes to 'The Turn of the Screw' when a similar ghost story is told to the narrator by his aunt.