"Through the Cracked and Fragmented Self": William James and The Turn of the Screw

Abstract

most powerful, the most nerve-shattering ghost he had ever read, the author was pleased, remarking, I meant to scare the whole world with that story.' But since its publication in 1898, literary critics have debated whether The Turn of the Screw is a ghost story or a Freudian study in delusion. The Freudian school took as its point of departure Edmund Wilson's argument that young governess who tells the story is a neurotic case of sex repression and the ghosts are not real ghosts at all but merely the governess's hallucinations.2 Several generations of anti-Freudian critics took this case apart point by point, with arguments ranging from the obvious-the governess can hardly be called a frustrated spinster at the age of twenty-to the authorial Henry James plainly stated his intention to represent Peter Quint and Miss Jessel as agents of evil.3 In 1955, Leon Edel understandably declared the debate long and rather tiresome.4 Over the last few decades, however, critics have come to accept that The Turn of the Screw, as Dorothea Krook observed, yields two meanings, both equally self-consistent and self-complete. James's triumph in the tale was to make his reader believe both in the ghosts and the obsession, until we could not be sure which was true.5 As Tzvetan Todorov has argued, The Turn of the Screw is a remarkable example of the literature of the fantastic, a genre defined by the reader's hesitation between a natural and a supernatural understanding of the events described.6