The Turn of The Screw - Literary Significance and Criticism

Literary Significance and Criticism

The dispute over the reality of the ghosts has had a real effect on some critics, most notably Edmund Wilson, who was one of the first major proponents of the insane governess theory. However, he eventually recanted this opinion after consideration of the governess's point-by-point description of Quint. Then John Silver indicated hints in the story that the governess might have gained previous knowledge of Quint's appearance in non-supernatural ways. This induced Wilson to recant his recantation and return to his original opinion that the governess was abnormal and that the ghosts existed only in her imagination.

William Veeder sees Miles's eventual death as induced by the governess. By a complex psychoanalytic reading, Veeder concludes that the governess expressed her repressed rage toward her father and toward the master of Bly on Miles.

Other critics, however, have defended the governess strongly. They indicate that James's letters, his New York Edition preface, and his Notebooks contain no definite evidence that The Turn of the Screw was intended as anything other than a straightforward ghost story, and James certainly wrote ghost stories that did not depend on the imagination of the narrator. For example, “Owen Wingrave″ includes a ghost which causes the sudden death of its title character although no one actually sees it. James's Notebooks entry indicates that he was inspired originally by a tale he heard from Edward White Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury. There are indications that the story James was told was about an incident in Hinton Ampner, where a woman named Mary Ricketts in 1771 moved from her home after the apparitions of a man and a woman had appeared day and night, staring through the windows and bending over the beds, making her feel her children were in danger.

James revised the novella substantially over the years. In The Collier's Weekly Version of The Turn of the Screw, Peter G. Beidler presents the tale in its original serial form and presents a detailed analysis of the changes James made over the years. Among many other changes, James changed the ages of the children.

Poet and literary critic Craig Raine in his essay on Sex in nineteenth-century literature states quite categorically his belief that Victorian readers would have identified the two ghosts as child-molesters.