The Turn of the Screw

In the preface to the New York Edition of his complete works, William James writes of “The Turn of Screw,” published more than ten years earlier in 1898, that “there is not only from beginning to end of the matter not an inch of expatiation, but my values are positively all blanks save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness — on which punctual effects of strong causes no writer can ever fail to plume himself — proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures.” By which he meant to explain the astounding lack of clarity with which one walks away from the story. The persistent shroud of doubt which accompanies the reader from beginning to end — a doubt concerning the motives of the characters and the ontological status of the “prodigies” or apparitions — is ostensibly an artistic device that maximizes the effect — and the affect — of horror in the reader, this being the genre of the piece. To this, one says “chapeau” in due recognition of the artist's accomplishment. The piece is a formal feat of design and of execution, one which rewards multiple readings.

Where one may pick apart James's own account of his story is in consideration of the role of the so-called “blanks,” which for him were adumbrations of a deep horror, the content of which the reader is to supply. His considerations, he writes, were chiefly practical. “One had seen, in fiction, some grand form of wrong-doing, or better still of wrong-being, imputed, seen it promised and announced […] and then, all lamentably, shrink to the compass of some particular brutality, some particular immorality, some particular infamy portrayed: with the result, alas, of the demonstration’s falling sadly short.” That horror lies not in the demonstrated, the spoken, but rather in the hidden, the unspoken, is today a truism, one which constitutes one of the foundational axioms of Freudian psychoanalysis.

It is not, however, the spoken/unspoken dichotomy which interests me here, and which I believe makes James's story more interesting than merely an example of expertly crafted genre fiction, but rather that of the speakable/unspeakable, the legible/illegible. James himself, again in the preface to the New York Edition, locates the specter of “absolute” wrong, or “absolute horror” “quite exactly in […] the reader’s experience.” That is to say, in order to maximize the effect of horror in the reader, he must leave it up to their imagination. The implication seems to be that this horror is a matter of the private or the personal. One may critique this view by saying that James does not go far enough. That it may not be that absolute horror is unspeakable because it is a matter of personal constitution or proclivity — it may rather be that horror is unspeakable merely because it is so.

James’s title indicates this very possibility. The phrase “turn of the screw” appears in the fiction exactly twice. The first instance is on the first page, and is used in reference to a ghost story which the characters in the frame narrative have just heard. Douglas, who is to procure the main tale of the novella, says in response to that “sufficiently” captivating story,

I quite agree — in regard to Griffin’s ghost, or whatever it was — that its appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But it’s not the first occurrence of its charming kind that I know to have been concerned with a child. If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children—?

Here, the phrase seems to indicate the effectiveness of the use of children in a horror story: to give another turn of the screw is to make the apparitions more effective as narrative devices, more convincing, more horrible.

The second time the phrase is used is at the end of the story, when the unnamed narrator elects to confront the child Miles, who has been entrusted to her stewardship, about the possibility that he is in league with the apparitions. Throughout the novella, the governess has her doubts about whether the apparitions appear to the children at all, and whether they are working with them or are possessed by them. It is these doubts she has in mind when she exhorts herself to remain strong and stay true to her purpose:

Here at present I felt afresh — for I had felt it again and again — how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking ‘nature’ into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. No attempt, none the less, could well require more tact than just this attempt to supply, one’s self, all the nature. How could I put even a little of that article into a suppression of reference to what had occurred? How on the other hand could I make a reference without a new plunge into the hideous obscure?

It is amusing to see her speak of suppressing “what had occurred,” given the moderate probability that the apparitions in question may be a figment of her own imagination, and the near certainty that the children’s collusion with them is such a figment.

We have here two very different contexts for the usage of the titular phrase: on the one hand, it refers to the fortification of an artistic trope to maximize its effectiveness in the reader; in the second instance, it is the hedging of one’s will against the demoralizing effects of the “hideous obscure.” In either case, the phrase might be read in conjunction with the many references in the text to ships and to the governess as a captain — a play, perhaps, on the etymology of govern, which comes from the Greek word for steering a boat. To turn the screw is to tighten it, shore up the ship of one’s will against a sea of doubt, make one’s device more effective or secure. That one may over-tighten and so strip the screw is implied by the governess’s ultimate murder of the very child she was meant to protect, a murder which she commits in the act of sheltering him from the ghost.

What gives to the horror of the prodigies a historical dimension beyond their status as literary tropes is one detail given in the circumstance of the male ghost’s first appearance: that he appears atop a tower which, by the governess’s account, was likely designed in the spirit of “a romantic revival that was already a respectable past.” It is worth thinking more about this use of the word “romantic,” and how it may open the story up to historical analysis.

The word “romantic” is used in the text four times. Two of these occurrences are in chapter three, the chapter in which the ghost first manifests. This manifestation occurs when the governess is taking a walk:

One of the thoughts that, as I don’t in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet some one. Some one would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn’t ask more than that — I only asked that he should know; and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face. That was exactly present to me — by which I mean the face was — when, on the first of these occasions, at the end of a long June day, I stopped short on emerging from one of the plantations and coming into view of the house. What arrested me on the spot — and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for — was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there! — but high up, beyond the lawn and at the very top of the tower to which, on that first morning, little Flora had conducted me. This tower was one of a pair — square incongruous crenellated structures — that were distinguished, for some reason, though I could see little difference, as the new and the old. They flanked opposite ends of the house and were probably architectural absurdities, redeemed in a measure indeed by not being wholly disengaged nor of a height too pretentious, dating, in their gingerbread antiquity, from a romantic revival that was already a respectable past. I admired them, had fancies about them, for we could all profit in a degree, especially when they loomed through the dusk, by the grandeur of their actual battlements; yet it was not at such an elevation that the figure I had so often invoked seemed most in place.

What, in this passage, the governess wishes to be recognized is the “remarkable” feat of having taken charge of the children without disturbing their uncle. This, one may recall, was his one stipulation on hiring her, that she never write to him with news of the children nor to ask him for help. This leads her to take the young boy Miles’s education into her own hands after he is expelled from school, for reasons which are relatively unclear, even after his account at the end of the novella. She admits, only a few pages before this apparition appears, that she was quite unqualified to teach him. She explains, however, that she was “off her guard,” after which she tells us that when she had considered the children’s futures, “the only form that in my fancy the after-years could take for them was that of a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden and the park.” She continues, “It may be of course above all that what suddenly broke into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness — that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast.” This beast is the very ghost that appears soon after upon the tower.

The Romantic as a concept is the regime of fancy, imagination, what James’s brother William would call religious experience. It is not the existence of the Romantic which is most interesting in the text; rather it is the governess’s attitude toward it. The Romantic is, to borrow an old trope, like the sea; indeed, the sea upon which a ship sails, in anticipation of which and against which one turns the screw, so to speak. The governess’s constant mistake is to trust too much in her will as the proper defense against the overwhelming absurdity of nature. Even at the time of writing her account she has not fully come to realize this. The story is written après coup, and yet we still find a suggestion of hubris in her way of describing her first impression of the house: “I had the view of a castle of romance inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place as would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take all colour out of story-books and fairy-tales. Wasn't it just a story-book over which I had fallen a-doze and a-dream? No; it was a big ugly antique but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half-displaced and half-utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was strangely at the helm!” Perhaps we may read her self-proclaimed being at the helm as a form of confession to her role in bringing about the disaster which concludes the novella. More likely, it seems to be yet another self-aggrandizement in the face of the overwhelming absurdity with which she was —genuinely — confronted.

This absurdity is the absurdity of the illegible. Legibility is the province of description, dialogue, understanding, measurement. It is not a totalizing phenomenon. There may be a legible half to the beast which first crouches and waits, and later attacks. But there is something illegible about the beast as well, especially in the specter of death which it brings to fruition. What is so disturbing in the novella is the dryness of the prose, its almost scientific exactness — characteristic of the fiction of James in general — mixed with the utter anarchy of that which it brings to the reader’s consideration. The novella exists as close to the border of the legible as it possibly can. To wander even a step beyond that which is explicitly said is not even necessary in order to appreciate the precipitous escarpment along which James paves his narrative. What distinguishes a responsible from an irresponsible reader is the degree to which one sees that James is structurally describing, not a situation specific to the governess alone, but rather a general-historical condition of modernity: the constant threat of the Romantic, the mythic, the tragic, the violent.

The Romantic is not a category that is confined to a single period or point in time. It is a constant possibility which haunts our world, which is not our own only, but that of all who have come before. The house as a mélange of old and new is a metaphor for the way in which the story, though formally excellent and enclosed, opens on a vast and absurd abyss of historical reality, a reality which is violent and cruel. The governess's hamartia is her belief in her will as adequate to face the sea of troubles which encompasses her. The hamartia of the distanced, bourgeois reader is the belief that that sea of troubles is unique to the governess.

James's fiction belongs to a period of immense optimism in technology and the future of humanity, but it also belongs to the literary period that produced texts such as Musil's Törleß. While James's style may look nothing like the modernists who came about after him in the early twentieth century, writers who often prized direct treatment of the subject at hand, his concerns nonetheless anticipate theirs, and his style, as indirect as it may be, may also more closely than theirs treat of the patent abysmal absurdity which is one of the main topics of so-called modern literature. What is at stake in the novella is the violence that threatens to come with the ignorance of the wound that we all bear as historically determined subjects. What is never said, but is nonetheless proffered through a structural analysis of what is, by the author's own account, a formal — by which I understand structural — chef-d’oeuvre, is the dire necessity for a different way of encountering the illegible.

30 August 2026