Counter-Turning The Turn of the Screw

Abstract

For over a century, critics have typically approached Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw from the perspective of its young governess, whose obsession with her charges and the spectral figures that allegedly haunt them ultimately leads to disaster, the death of Miles. This article, however, offers a reading atypical of those previously accomplished. Analyzing the novella from a psychoanalytic and narratological perspective, it argues for a shift in point of view, contending that the locus of the novel, the manuscript ostensibly documenting the harrowing experiences of the young governess, is not penned by a woman but rather by a man, the principle reader of the thing itself, Douglas. Given the shift in point of view, it becomes wholly evident that it is Douglas’s wildly erotic fantasy that becomes the substance of the manuscript, one culminating not in the death of a child but, rather, in the petite mort or the “little death” of sexual orgasm, the equivalent of a masturbatory episode on the child’s part while in the passionate embrace of his governess. Read in this manner, the narrative coheres as a young man’s romantic retrospective of desire, obsession and sexual initiation.