The Lure of the Demonic: James and Durrenmatt

Abstract

IT MAY NOT be possible to resolve in our time the that makes James's The Turn of the Screw present quite different meanings to different readers. For this ambiguity may turn out to be a product, not of absolute textual conditions, but of the conflicting, and indeed competing, senses of reality that characterize a period of philosophical transition. One can imagine a composition of these, an alteration in the philosophic (moral, epistemological) landscape, that may lead to a surer, more generally agreed upon, reading of the text. But it is also imaginable that philosophic differences will persist, and with them the critical dissension that will make possible new collections of essays that disagree with each other.' On the face of it the story is concerned with the governess' battle against an objective evil that is infecting the character of the children, Miles and Flora. Some readers' acceptance of the literal text is hampered by several assumptions of romantic origin and hue: the essential innocence of children; the corruptness of authority, whether political or educational; the untrustworthiness of traditionalist attitudes toward wrongdoing-the last reinforced by a more recent tendency to suppose that concern with saving others is a gross imposition unless it is material salvation that is offered. Interlaced with these is the habit of