The Turn of the Screw
A History of Its Critical Interpretations 1898 - 1979
Edward J. Parkinson, PhD

Chapter V - The Influence of Structuralism: 1958-1969

1. Analyses of Narrative Techniques: Jones, West, Rubin, Costello, Enck

We have seen that the period from 1949 through 1957 was dominated by the figures of Wilson and Heilman, as the best critics strove to effect syntheses of these two giants' competing sets of insights--respectively, psychoanalytic and theological readings of the story. So persuasive and so obviously valid were the two sets of insights that few critics of stature could produce interpretations affirming exclusively one side of the controversy.

During the next period under discussion we find a continuation of this pattern with important modifications. One of the most important of these modifications, as Kimbrough points out, is an increasing "emphasis on technique rather than content" (235) in critical analyses of the story. Increasingly, that is, critics, following the lead broached by Edel in his discussion of the novella in The Psychological Novel--published in 1955--concentrated less on deriving philosophical themes which would integrate the psychoanalytic and theological readings and more on studying the ways in which the ambiguity had been produced by the author--through a study of his narrative techniques--and the effects of such ambiguity on the reader's experience of the text. Thus, the ambiguity tended to be cited as worthy of study in its own right--not merely as a pointer to some theme. This tended to produce two kinds of criticism--genre criticism and reader-response criticism. The former tended to be mixed with source studies as critics looked at the literary influences James had employed and the ways in which he had modified them to produce this piece of artistry--with its ambiguous undertones. These ambiguities were often seen as results of patterns of various exponents from sources as diverse as novels, plays, the writings of psychiatrists such as Freud, Charcot, Janet, and Parish, and the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research. Sometimes, other writings by James were included as sources which appeared in modified form in the The Turn of the Screw--and thus, the door was opened to a resurgence of that authorial criticism which seeks to understand more fully a particular literary work by studying the author's entire canon. This naturally led to a new emphasis on speculations about the author's intentions as realized in the construction of the literary work.

Alexander E. Jones, in 1958, followed Edel in emphasizing the importance of the narrative "frame" of the novella--i.e., the three interrelated narrators-- the anonymous guest, Douglas, and the anonymous governess.

Jones interprets the story in a traditional, non-Freudian manner--holding that the ghosts are objectively existing entities from which the governess wished to save the children. He credits her with a partial victory at the story's end: "...Flora has been removed from the corrupting atmosphere of Bly: and, although Miles is dead, his heart has been dispossessed" (122). The incompleteness of her victory is attributable not to any fault of hers but to the overwhelming power of the evil she has been forced to fight. Admitting that she has some defects--of the kind which critics such as Lydenberg have cited (pride, bad judgment, etc.)--Jones denies that she wants the ghosts to be there and insists that "her all-too-human frailty should not blind the reader to her great accomplishment. Standing resolutely at her own little Armageddon, she has routed the forces of evil" (122). Those traits which critics such as Lydenberg have taken as evidence against her Jones takes as evidence of her honesty--since she included them in her record of events.

Jones, in arguing for his interpretation of the story, relies mainly on evidence of two kinds: the text itself, which he interprets in a New Critical manner, and evidence of James's intentions which he discerns from an examination of the author's statements about the work in the Preface to the New York Edition and in correspondence about the novella. In these respects his methodology resembles the phenomenological criticism of Kenton. Like Kenton, he seems to see the text as an enigmatic message from the author and the critic's task as a deciphering of the message the author intended to convey. His understanding of this intention is, of course, very different from Kenton's. He is also similar to Kenton in his overriding interest in fully experiencing--not only intellectually but also emotionally--those effects the author intended to convey. Jones differs from Kenton, however, in his additional emphasis on an objective examination of the narrative structure of the work as an aid to the understanding of the author's intended effects. Hence his emphasis on the prologue.

Jones does not use the material in the prologue "against" the governess, however, as do critics such as Goddard and Rubin. Instead, he sees this often used device of "story within a story" as intended to produce a greater verisimilitude--as the reader is drawn into "the circle around the fire" with Douglas and his Christmas guests. Furthermore, such a device, suggests Jones, can "establish an illusion of reality" (112) by distancing the author from the improbable supernatural events to be related. "The skeptic may scoff at the ghosts, the haunting, the sorcery: but James answers--here is the `document'" (112-113). Furthermore, Douglas can "set the stage" for the governess. Thus, the prologue, which has so often been used to support non-apparitionist readings, Jones uses to support an apparitionist reading.

The all-pervasive ambiguity of the story Jones sees as the result of a rendition by a first person narrator who is not omniscient. As she reasons from incomplete evidence, according to Jones, she involves the reader in her story--and the effects of suspense and fear are thereby necessarily heightened. Jones also admits a pervasive ambiguity about the precise evil of the ghosts and suggests that part of the horror arises as the reader is forced to fill in the blanks from his own experience--i.e., "imagine the details for himself" (118). Inconsistently, however, he then criticizes Freudian critics for their "excessive ingenuity" (117) in so doing--citing, for instance, Freudian counters to the apparitionist "identification scene" argument which, he believes, illegitimately go outside the text by assuming, for example, that Flora described Quint to the governess before the first appearance (Cargill's position) or that the governess learned about Quint from trips to the nearby village (Silver's position) (121).

Also, Jones--in stating that the governess cannot be a "pathological liar" because then everything in the story would be subject to disbelief and James would be "violating the rules of the craft" (122)--fails to appreciate Edel's suggestion that the story, with its unreliable narrator, is, perhaps, representative of a new genre, the "psychological novel," which might have new "rules."

We find this same emphasis on technique rather than content in the criticism of Muriel West. In her outstanding article, "The Death of Miles in the Turn of the Screw," West suggests that the physical violence of the governess is the cause of Miles's death and that, in the final scene of the story, the governess succumbs to possession by Quint. West concentrates, in advancing this thesis, on a close analysis of "the governess's method of telling her story" as she relates the final happenings between herself and Miles:

the serene, dignified dialogue (provocative, however, as a drawn-out bit of back fence gossip) presents an easily followed narrative thread that tends to obscure the nervous excitement and rash physical activity constituting the more intricately woven background fabric of the tapestry (284).

Anent this, in New Critical style, she cites other evidence from the text--pertaining, for example, to the apparent physical size and strength of the governess. West also details numerous ambiguities of language (pronoun references, for example, which are unclear) to demonstrate that the governess may be possessed throughout the story, may become possessed at the end as Miles becomes dispossessed, and may be responsible for killing Miles.

West reminds us of how, early in the final encounter, the governess "`sprang straight up, reduced... to the mere blind movement of getting hold of him, drawing him close...'" and, in the process "`fell for support against the nearest piece of furniture...'" (283). Reminding us of how the governess "enfolds him, draws him close - and so close she can feel `in the sudden fever of his little body the tremendous pulse of his little heart,'" West suggests that

we may pause to wonder how tight a young woman of twenty would have to squeeze a boy of ten to feel the fever in his body and the beating of his heart; hard enough, we may suppose, to hurt him... (284).

Pointing to the governess's admission that, during the conversation about his difficulties at school, she "`for pure tenderness - shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all for nothing, he had condemned [her] to months of torment,'" West suggests that "her shaking is vigorous enough to cause him pain that is physical rather than mental" and that this is why the boy looks "`in vague pain all around the top of the room' and draws `his breath, two or three times over, as if with difficulty'" (285). West also directs our attention to "Miles's white face, the dew of sweat on his forehead..." (285).

Toward the end of the encounter, West points out, the governess tell us more about what she has been saying than about what she has been doing.

But his continued struggle for air, and particularly, his being at her `in a white rage' forcibly suggest that the earlier `desolation of his surrender' has left him. We can picture him fighting her now, struggling to free himself from her clothes - whatever they might be subsequent to her `veritable leap.' The abyss of shadow is too deep for us to make out an armlock, a scissors hold, a side chancery, or a full or a half-Nelson. Whatever she is doing (most probably her action shifts from moment to moment), she presents us with a strangely confused description of Miles's response: `His face gave again, round the room, its convulsed supplication'... Is his `supplication' convulsed? Or his `)face('? (286).

That the governess succumbs to possession, West maintains, is suggested by numerous syntactical ambiguities.

`"No more, no more, no more! I shrieked to my visitant as I tried to press him against me...' What does she mean by `him' - Miles or her `visitant'? Does she know which is which? From this point on her speeches lose a good measure of their earlier composure and clarity (286).

Later in the encounter, "the ambiguities become even more complex - well-nigh indecipherable." West directs our attention to the following passage "as a supreme example of James's `amusement' in creating reader wonder with ambiguity...": "`What does he matter now, my own? - what will he ever matter? I have you,' I launched at the beast, `but he has lost you forever!' Then, for the demonstration of my work, `there there!' I said to Miles." West points out that the governess "uses the word `launched' in a way that could be construed as a speech-label meaning `said vigorously,' or as an action-word meaning `threw myself.'" Even more importantly, however,

we cannot tell if she is speaking )to( Miles or to the `beast'--who is now, fantastically, diffused throughout the room `like the taste of poison...' If she is speaking to the `beast,' then she is saying that )she( `has him'; that is, she now is `possessed,' and Miles at last is free of a supposed `possession' by an evil spirit... her last words echo the possession theme: `his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.' On the other hand, if she is speaking throughout to Miles, she says she has )him( (at the same time she gives the `beast' a kick or a push) and she consequently is the `possessing' agent--an end-result she has long desired. When he earlier rebuffed her (on the occasion of her visit to his bedroom), saying (though `ever so gently') that he wants her to `let' him `alone,' she continues to `linger beside him' and question him. When she senses `a small faint quaver of consenting consciousness,' she says: `It made me drop on my knees beside the bed and seize once more the chance of possessing him' (286-287).

West is at pains to argue that these ambiguities have been deliberately created. In so doing she considers other fictional works in the Jamesian canon, comparing the governess's physical behavior with that of the haunted Spencer Brydon in "The Jolly Corner" (287-288) and contrasting the "good health and sound heart" of Miles, "which are never questioned in the tale," with "James's other stories concluding with the death of the young boy (`The Pupil' and `The Author of Beltraffio')" in which "we are prepared by earlier accounts of the boy's health to accept his final death" (283). She also cites statements James made about the story, particularly his designation of the novella (in a letter to Paul Bourget) as "an exercise in the art of not appearing to oneself to fail" (286) and his distinction (in the Preface to Volume 12 of the New York Edition) between the governess's "crystalline...record of so many intense anomalies and obscurities" and "her interpretation of them, a different matter" (283).

West does not attempt to derive any psychological, philosophical, or theological messages from the ambiguities she has divined--the all-pervasive ambiguity is there for its own sake:

to pursue the comparisons further would go far beyond our present purpose which has been, simply, to read )The Turn of the Screw( with more than `some' attention... We might force ourselves to attempt a definition of what precisely ails the governess, thus tearing rough (and futilely perhaps) at the veils of ambiguity and abysses of shadow that form the `clothing - or much of it - of the )effects( that constitute the material' of Henry James's art (288).

This, however, is not West's intention - her aim is only to demonstrate an irreducible ambiguity and show how James produced it.

Let it suffice, then, to conclude by saying: In the final section of )The Turn of the Screw( the governess indulges in an exuberant debauch of violence that contributes to the sudden death of the little Miles - or dreams that she did (288).

Louis D. Rubin bluntly declares that "the whole point about the puzzle is its ultimate insolubility" ("One More Turn" 328) and proceeds to shed what light he can on the manner in which James has constructed this "insoluble" conundrum, developing in the process the possible identity between Douglas and Miles which Collins had suggested.

Rubin, however, calls attention to one important additional point, a syntactical ambiguity in Douglas's statement "It was long ago, and this episode was long before." Rubin suggests that the "episode" may not be the twenty-year-old governess's relationship with Miles and Flora, but, rather, her interaction with Douglas when he met her during his summer vacation from Trinity.

The syntax is ambiguous. He appears to be making Douglas say that the episode in question took place long before Douglas knew the governess. But grammatically at least there is also the possibility that `it was long ago' could refer to the time when the woman sent the manuscript to Douglas, or perhaps when she died, so that `this episode was long before' may be the time when the story itself took place (316).

Rubin suggests that, if the real story is the encounter between the governess and Douglas rather than the ghostly encounters recorded in her manuscript, the latter might be seen as an allegorical account

which an unmarried, middle-aged woman sent to a man shortly before her death, a man with whom she had once been in love when he was still a boy, in order to tell him about that love. It would then be, in short, an allegory of love, as it were, the application of which the governess intended for her now-grown lover to guess. This would indeed go far toward accounting for Douglas's extreme concern over the whole thing in the prologue (319-320).

In other words, "the story Douglas reads, supposedly about another little boy and the governess, is in fact about him" (318). This possibility would later, in 1979, be developed at greater length by Sr. Marcella M. Holloway, C.S.J. Holloway, however, argues that Douglas is Miles in order to call attention to what she perceives to be the psychological and philosophical themes of the novella--"the tragedy of love repressed," as well as the destructiveness of that neurotic love with which the governess envelopes Miles and which she would have inflicted on Douglas, to her own detriment as well as his, had their love evolved into an overt relationship. Holloway's emphasis, accordingly, is on the themes of the work rather than on the ambiguous effects themselves. Rubin, in contrast, is not interested in searching for philosophical or psychological insights but, rather, in demonstrating that, if we accept the possible identity of Douglas and Miles, "the whole basis for believing in the governess's narrative is seriously undercut" (318) and the tale's ambiguity is all-pervasive.

Collins's article had concentrated exclusively on the possible identity of Douglas and Miles. Rubin, however, includes this possible identity as one item in as long list of examples of elements in the narrative which, taken together, demonstrate "what a master James was at the deliberate creation of ambiguity with the very syntax of his prose..." (326). Rubin cites apparent "lies" told by the governess: her assertion to Mrs. Grose in chapter seven that "Flora saw" Miss Jessel across the lake, which appears to contradict the account in chapter six; her later description of "the portentous little activity by which [Flora] sought to divert attention" from the apparition, which contradicts her earlier description of Flora's absorption in the task in making a boat out of two pieces of wood; her identification of the man looking through the window --whom she describes in detail - with the man previously seen on the tower at twilight when they were "too far apart to call to one another" and thus, when "to have made out such details would be... too remarkable for anyone to believe" (323); her assertion to Mrs. Grose in chapter sixteen that Miss Jessel had spoken in the schoolroom, which contradicts the preceding chapter's description of her encounter with the silent specter. Rubin also, in discussing the death of Miles, cites an interesting ambiguity which West had missed:

Does( Miles actually pronounce the name? How can we be sure it is Miles, and not she, who asks, `It's )he(?' If the question is hers, then Miles, not the governess, answers, `Whom do you mean by "he"?' And, in that event, it would not be Miles, but the governess herself, who speaks the next sentence: `Peter Quint - you devil!' Not once does James write, `I said,' or `he asked.' Direct identification of the speakers is missing. I cannot think that in these crucial sentences of dialogue, he did this unintentionally (327).

Rubin does not suggest, however, that the points he has made add up to a conclusive interpretation of the story. Douglas may or may not be Miles--the similarities and syntactical ambiguities suggest but do not prove. Flora may have seen Jessel and then turned her back to the water, or the governess - after seeing the apparition--may have seen the little girl looking across the lake and then may have omitted the latter observation from her account in chapter six, or she may have known through extrasensory perception that Flora perceived Miss Jessel. Similarly, she may, in the schoolroom, have been able to read the apparition's mind so accurately that the ghost might as well have spoken--hence, perhaps, her ambiguous "It came to that." All of these possible conjectures demonstrate that "the whole story is to be doubted, and we can be certain of nothing" (326). This is why "we have had theory after theory proposed as the answer ... and there is still no single explanation which satisfies everyone" (314).

Rubin, like so many other critics, cites passages from James's writings about The Turn of the Screw and refers to patterns elsewhere in James's fictional canon to prove that a particular reading of the story is in accord with the author's intentions. Thus, commenting on the striking similarities between Douglas and Miles, Rubin opines that "we can usually assume that when Henry James does something in a novel, he has a reason for doing so" (319). He relates the governess's misleading statements to the rest of James's canon:

I do not recall who it was who once said that one can never properly understand a James novel until he realizes that all the characters are liars, but it is a very perceptive remark, provided that one realizes that there are various kinds of liars (319).

Rubin--like Kenton, Edel, Collins, and Levy, among others--attempts to peek into James's psyche as the author imagined his readers' reactions to the story he was creating:

One can imagine him chuckling at the whole thing. A triumph of craft indeed, of precisely the sort that he most enjoyed. For had he not accomplished just what he said he wanted to do: renovate a supposedly outmoded story form, the tale of horror? ... He had transformed the psychotic hallucinations of an obsessed woman into a drama of the supernatural, made us believe both in the ghosts and obsession, until we could not be sure which was true. How thorough the ambiguity he attained...! The further we try to extend the meanings of a passage, a scene, the more elusive the answer. How often one finds oneself, after weighing all the evidence, coming to the same conclusion: `It could be either' (327).

Rubin does not, however, turn the doorknob he seems to have brushed against--he does not, like Edel and Levy, psychoanalyze James to discover hidden motives for the wish to effect such ambiguity. Instead, he portrays James simply as an artful entertainer rejoicing in the creation of a new form of entertainment: a ghost story which "has led us along first one trail and then another, until finally we have doubled back upon ourselves and are just where we started" (326).

Indeed, Rubin seems uninterested in opening any philosophical, theological, or psychological doors. He seems to accept Poe's assumptions that the purpose of art is entertainment and the critical task is to point out in what way and how well the purpose has been achieved. His article ends with praise for the work as eminently successful entertainment:

Carefully, stroke by stroke, he built his riddle, spread his hints, told and denied, held us. The evening's entertainment he prepared for those fortunate readers of )Collier's( magazine sixty-five years ago remains as fresh as on the day it was written. `The art of the romancer,' James once wrote, `is, "for the fun of it," insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him.' We are still trying to determine where it was that he did it (328).

Rubin adopts a similar approach to the novella in The Teller and the Tale, asserting that James

with consummate artistry has led us off in one direction after another, with the trial constantly doubling back on itself, so that we are confronted finally with the personality of the author (101).

Rubin's emphasis in this study is on the construction of various narrative voices and their relationship to their authors. His point here is that James "schemed to present a conjuncture" by constructing a narrator who "did not know how to conceal what she had to conceal if we were to believe her" (101).

Donald P. Costello, too, declined to take sides in the dispute between apparitionists and non-apparitionists--maintaining that such debates arise from an irreducible ambiguity which the author has deliberately embedded in the very structure of the story in order to produce in the reader a dual effect of mystification and terror. Costello's purpose, accordingly, is not to affirm one side or the other of that controversy because such

interpretations, in their single-minded insistence upon the completeness of their reading of the story, have robbed it of a whole dimension... either taken away its ability to mystify... or robbed it of what James called its `dear old sacred terror.' ... Any interpretation that takes away the ghosts weakens the story's ability to horrify; any interpretation that takes away the reader's uncertainty weakens the story's ability to mystify (312-313).

Costello does not attempt to derive any philosophical or other themes from this irreducible ambiguity. His purpose, rather, is to demonstrate "that a close examination of the structure of The Turn of the Screw will indicate that James so built his tale as to make it both to puzzle the reader and to horrify him..." (312). In other words, Costello is interested in narrative structure rather than meaning.

Costello contends that "this double effect" is engendered by the juxtaposition of factual "representations"--including accurate statements of what the governess sees--and dubious "interpretations" of these data--statements, for example, that her visions are supernatural rather than hallucinatory. Accordingly, "scenes in which the governess represents the action usually result in horror; scenes in which the governess interprets the action usually result in mystification" (313). While the latter are "in James' words, `challengeable' (313), the former are "exceedingly specific and detailed" so that they are likely to be "accepted as real and hence horrible..." (319). Most helpfully, Costello provides a detailed chart consisting of "a scene-by-scene breakdown of the entire book according to representational and interpretive scenes" (319).

Costello provides another chart to show how the various incidents fit together in an interrelated and suspenseful pattern. This chart divides the story into "thirteen... sequences of structure" (314). In each sequence an incident and its interpretation are preceded by a "foretelling" or introduction by the governess and followed by some plan of action which connects the sequence to later events in the story.

The first sequence, for example, concerns the governess's receipt of the letter stating that Miles will not be allowed to return to his boarding school. The "foretelling" is as follows: "The first day had been, on the whole, as I have expressed, reassuring, but I was to see it wind up to a change of note." The incident--the result of the letter--is followed by her interpretation--first she concludes that Miles must be "an injury to the others" and then is merely bewildered. Her plan is "not to mention the letter to the Master or to Miles but simply to `see it out'" (315). This fourfold structure obtains throughout the first twelve "sequences"; in the thirteenth sequence, however, the emotional confrontation between Miles and the governess is followed, not by interpretation, but by the final incident--the death of Miles. "For the first time," in other words,

the Incident (the second element in the structure pattern) leads directly to a consequent incident, with no interpretation by the governess, and no further plan of action, and no overlapping foretelling. The forward thrust is over, and the story ends (318).

We find this same emphasis on technique rather than content in Muriel West's brilliant book-length source study, A Stormy Night with The Turn of the Screw. In this work West's fictional narrator discovers in the novella a bewildering plethora of sources and other "literary influences."

For example, the narrator discerns in the story "the most characteristic, the most typical, of the stock situations and devices of the gothic" (5) which seem to be exaggerated "in the Northanger Abbey tradition" (14) but which, on closer inspection, are "not what one might expect in a satire in the Northanger Abbey tradition" because "they are too accurate, too clinical..." (23).

Similarly, the narrator calls attention to various biblical motifs but, upon closer examination, realizes that their inclusion in the story raises questions without providing answers. There are, for instance, elements suggestive of the First Book of Samuel stories about David and Saul and the Witch of Endor (recall that the governess compares Miles playing the piano for her to "David playing for Saul") which seem to be deliberately inserted into the novella but which engender

nagging, unformulated notions... and questions: why did Miles have to die? There couldn't be any sensible connection between his playing the part of David, for David was old and stricken in years before he slept with his fathers and was buried in the City of David (18-19).

Likewise, the abnormal silences and distortions of the normal experience of time which characterize her visions are reminiscent of "old accounts of prophets, saints, monks and witches who `saw things' or `heard voices,'" including "the other Saul (the one whose names was changed to Paul on his conversion)" and "John of Patmos who witnessed the opening of the seventh seal... after `silence in heaven about the space of half an hour'" (21-22). These silences and time distortions, however, also suggest as possible sources the pathological experiences recorded in psychological and psychiatric writings such as Freud and Breuer's Studies in Hysteria, Braid's Neurypnology, or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep, and, of course, William James's Principles of Psychology (320-329).

Finally, to add to the confusion, the "scientific" sources include not only material concerning psychopathology but also the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research and, indeed, "all the thinking of the Gay Nineties on unexplained phenomena... men like Myers, Podmore, and Gurney--not to mention Henry James's brother William.." (33-35). Furthermore, in addition to "scientific" material concerning the supernatural, the narrator finds traces of "elves and fairies from folklore and Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream" (53-60).

After compiling this large combination of "sources" and "influences," the narrator at last concludes that no thematic pattern can be conveyed--that, instead--we have in The Turn of the Screw a dream--a nightmare perhaps--the reality of which exceeds what psychoanalysts would call its manifest content--although West does not use that terminology:

if )The Turn of the Screw( is ... just a dream (or nightmare) I needn't `go about to expound' those parts of it that didn't come clear. For, as Bottom the Weaver says (on waking after Puck has removed the ass's head and the spell): `Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound the dream... man is but a patch'd fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had.' I had already been such an ass, but I didn't care. I was glad not to have to go on puzzling about ambiguities and inconsistencies that in a dream world would make good enough sense (57).

The dream, however, is not only the reader's dream but also the governess's dream--and here, in her discussion of James's technique, West adds a novel twist--"another turn," if you will. For at least some of the literary influences--the Gothic effects, in particular, are referred to in the governess's discussion of her reading (she mentions The Mystery of Udolpho, for example). Thus, part of the ambiguity arises, West suggests, from the contrast between what may really have happened at Bly and the governess's interpretations stemming from her "already lively imagination" (7) which has been "stimulated by long sessions of reading, to satisfy the `curiosity of her youth,' about the horrible villainy of mankind" (9). The prologue, then, becomes important in understanding

how the trick was played. James had it all thought out ahead of time. His intermediate narrator, Douglas, plants some of the unexciting truths that the novel-devouring governess ignores, or develops to suit her own taste-her taste for sensational novels where the most innocent-seeming people turn out to be villains of the deepest dye--much as (according to some people) all cats are black at heart (15).

John J. Enck, too, considers the novella's ambiguities to be both irreducible and inherent in its structure. He, therefore, urges us to "read The Turn of the Screw not to discern whether the governess either tells objectively what happens or occasionally deceives herself but, rather simultaneously for both likelihoods" (262).

Enck agrees with Edel's contention in The Psychological Novel that The Turn of the Screw must be seen as a representative of a new genre in which ambiguity is deliberately engendered. He is thus, like Edel, an historical genre critic. Indeed, the failure to recognize to what genre The Turn of the Screw belongs is, in Enck's view, responsible for the long debate between apparitionists and non-apparitionists. Enck, however, takes Edel's point a step further--seeing the novella not only as a representative of a new literary genre but as "part of an international revolt in aesthetics" (259) which included musicians, painters, and sculptors as well as writers. Accordingly, Enck compares the tale's ambiguity to that found in the opera Ariadne auf Naxos and, in discussing the ambiguities of The Turn of the Screw, employs similes from both music and sculpture. In discussing the interaction between the children and the governess he suggests that

one must catch Miles's and Flora's accents as a kind of chorus and then the woman's perhaps malevolent keening which floats over them. The effect, no more than in atonal compositions which likewise found congenial the tempo at the turn of the century, becomes not a cacophony but releases new harmonics (263).

In a similar vein, Enck suggests,

Instead of envisaging the governess, Miles, and Flora as `rounded' figures, one might more profitably borrow another simile form sculpture; less like objects rendered in the round, they resemble elements of a mobile whose relationships, if restricted, constantly shift or, for a turn-of-the-century metaphor, commonplace items depicted abstractly and from several angles cubistically (262-263).

Enck does not, like West in A Stormy Night, pinpoint numerous literary sources for the novella. He would, however, be sympathetic to West's approach; for the "intended revolt in aesthetics" (259) to which he calls attention was founded, he contends, on

the self-conscious awareness that true art does not, cannot, incorporate `reality' (or life), but instead, refers to itself and its own nature. Concomitantly, the experimenters, shunning earlier romantics' empty phantasies, teasingly drew upon cliches from literature, experience, or legends, or society but inverted or caricatured them...purified of all personal and explanatory touches. To offer these constructs in full rigor artists stressed not the subject but the media in which they worked: paint, notes, marble, or words... Finally, the total impact, balanced by the uncommitted ambiguities, sought not to reassure but to disturb (260).

Accordingly, Enck would be neither surprised nor disturbed by the bewildering variety of "sources"--from the bible to Gothic novels to the writings of psychoanalysts and parapsychologists--which West's fictional narrator divined in The Turn of the Screw and by the failure of these diverse elements to fit together in a coherent thematic pattern. Such "futile squabbles" over themes, says Enck, arise from unhistorical readings which assume "that twentieth-century artists just perpetuate, often less effectually, outlooks inherited from the nineteenth" (260). We see here also, as in West's book, the influence of one of the central ideas of structuralism--that the world of literature is self-contained and self-referential.

In his discussion of James's technique, Enck isolates in the narrative "four strata," a distinction to Costello's representation-interpretation dichotomy. Enck lists these levels as follows:

those which admit little room for doubt, such as setting, season, external traits of character, and the background; those which the governess perhaps misinterprets, such as her own feelings or the tone in dialogue; those highly suspect, such as the extent of Miles's and Flora's depravity; those which could be downright wrong, such as the ghosts....While investigating these four levels...one should remember that on all of them through his usual stylistic devices James conscientiously permits readers to follow until, suddenly, the obviously objective dissolves in misstatements (263).

Thus, as so many other critics--among them, Rubin and Trachtenberg-have pointed out, a great part of the story's effect lies in reversals of the reader's expectations. Enck summarizes the governess's presentation in this way:

Her position initially accommodates all the trite aspects which usually enhance such a figure: a touch of Cinderella, an enchanted house, charming security in the classroom, and a charitable loyalty to a master. By a few breathtaking strokes James neatly undercuts the cliches and so invests them with a sinister power...While she repeatedly stresses her frantic grimaces, her firmness with Mrs. Grose, her courageous independence, and her constant fidelity something less (or more) than she claims to reveal about herself emerges between the lines (264).

The following are representative examples of the "slight but indicative details" which infect the governess's narrative with an "evasive duplicity":

...while discussing what Flora stares at on the lawn, she describes the spying place: `a large, square chamber, arranged with some state as a bedroom, [of] extravagant size....I had often admired it and I knew my way about in it'--not a privately edifying practice. Indeed, her vainly repeated `There, there, there' to Flora pointing out Miss Jessel and the same words directed at Miles for Peter Quint mark her as seldom auspiciously enlightening (265).

Enck's criticism is expressly technical rather than thematic. In his view the work "...needs no excuse beyond its aesthetic perfection" (268). Perhaps paradoxically, however, Enck seems to find a philosophical lesson precisely in the story's refusal to yield a definitive reading--i.e., in the very intractability of its ambiguity:

The Turn of the Screw( implacably tempts everyone into judgments--rash or laboriously reasoned. Nevertheless, as with most of James's later books, the closer the reading, the more one's sensitivity increases about the difficulty of all decisions: how very tenuous one's estimate of others--and one's self--must in civilized fairness be. The most solid appearance may dissolve as illusory to unmask irremediable horrors; an impeccable worship of `truth' (or `goodness' or `beauty') can conceal a temple to evil. One locks back at Bly and its unconventional inhabitants repeatedly because one cannot, dare not, make the final pronouncement. Whatever anxiety such hesitancy causes disappears in part because of the wholeness which art alone provides; one learns to suspend judgment (268-269).

2. Criticism Reflecting the Structuralist View of Literature as an Isolated and Self-Referential World

A: Heilman, 1961

Enck, we have seen, considered other artistic works--such as the opera Ariadne auf Naxos--without constructing a source study. He did not argue that James consciously or unconsciously drew upon these particular works in constructing the novella but rather that the work can be understood as the product of a certain cultural milieu which can be known through its various artistic productions and that the elements shared by many artistic works of a period can shed considerable light on any particular work. We have suggested that one origin of this approach is the structuralist view of the world of art--and, particularly, the world of literature--as isolated and self-referential. Whatever its cause, this type of criticism becomes increasingly prevalent in the 60's and 70's. We will consider only a few outstanding examples.

In 1961 Heilman reiterated the arguments he had previously made against the non-apparitionist position, accusing Wilson and other Freudians of "an ignoring of such objective facts as Miles's wrongdoing at school and the governess' obvious good health after the events of the story," as well as a certain disingenuousness in that "the new knowledge that sexuality influences many nonsexual activities is applied eagerly to the governess but not at all to Miles and Flora" (347). Once again, Heilman contended that this Freudian bias arose from certain culturally induced preconceptions on the part of critics--in particular,

several assumptions of romantic origin and hue: the essential innocence of children; the corruptness of authority, whether political or educational; the untruthworthiness of traditional 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 (346).

Because of the failure of these and similar arguments to settle the critical controversy, Heilman suggests the "presentation of new evidence." Since "new direct evidence--testimony as to author's purpose and so on--is not likely to show up" (348), Heilman turns to another type of evidence.

...There is a kind of literary evidence that is worth exploring--the evidence of literary works that are concerned with similar themes and that present a comparable sense of human reality. A kindred literary work may cast a light that will throw into relief certain things that James is doing and strengthen their influence upon the reader's sense of the whole (348).

In Duerrenmatt's novel The Pledge a hitherto stolid, cold detective named Matthai--called by his colleagues Matt the Automat--is profoundly affected by the sex murder of a pre-pubescent girl and, particularly, by the devastation of the parents when informed of the crime. He makes a "pledge" to the girl's mother to find the murderer and then becomes possessed by his obsession. Although a peddler who has been previously convicted of molesting a fourteen year old girl confesses to the murder, the evidence against him is inconclusive, and Matthai is convinced the real murderer is still at large. A friend of the deceased reveals that the victim had spoken of meeting a "giant" for some time in a secluded place and had drawn a picture of him. Matthai takes the picture to a psychiatrist and then, on the basis of a psychological profile of the killer and clues from two similar unsolved murders in neighboring cantons, forms a detailed hypothesis as to how the killer will strike again. Having left the police force (the authorities are determined to close the case), Matthai sets a trap for the killer by purchasing a gas station on a highway he thinks the man will eventually use and setting as "bait" the daughter of a prostitute he has brought in to live with him. This plan is conceived, of course, without the knowledge of the child or her mother.

After months of waiting, Matthai learns from the young girl's teacher that Annemarie has recently been absent from school without his or her mother's knowledge. He finds expensive chocolate in her possession, which she claims, unbelievably, to have received from an unidentified child her own age. Under further questioning, she admits she has been secretly meeting a "wizard" in an isolated dale. Matthai then tells her to continue meeting the "nice wizard"; meanwhile he and some of his former police colleagues secretly trail her and, for over a week, secretly watch her while she sits in the dale singing in apparent anticipation of the "wizard" who never arrives. Out of patience, they finally violently question and even beat the uncommunicative child. The child's mother then arrives and, upon learning Matthai's motive for befriending her and her daughter, denounces him as "swine." No more murders of the same type occur, so Matthai's theory that the murderer was alive and planning to strike again appears to be disconfirmed. Another detective points out that "anyone can give a child chocolate." The child's story about the "wizard" can be plausibly explained by the "fairy tales" Matthai has been constantly telling the child for months in order to keep her close to him so that he can watch her.

Years later, however, a wealthy old woman summons another detective to her hospital death bed and reveals that her deceased husband, thirty-two years her junior and previously her servant, had committed the other three murders and was secretly seeing Annemarie before being killed in a car accident. The man exactly fits the psychological profile sketched by the psychiatrist--he is a man sexually exploited by an older woman, fearful of confronting adult females, and filled with a murderous hatred of the female sex. Accordingly, says the detective, while Matthai was not "a Biblical figure, a kind of modern Abraham in the greatness of his hope and faith," neither was he "someone who searches for a non-existent murderer because he believes in the innocence of a guilty man..." (157) but rather a genius who became overconfident and failed to "reckon with the inevitable fractures and distortions of human reason," failed to realize that "there is this element of incalculability, of chance," (160-161) in human life. Instead, "the man degenerated mentally, physically, morally, became a sot. There was no helping him, no changing him" (150). Years later, Matthai, now "an old man," sits in his gas station, still waiting for the murderer--"his face transfigured by an insuperable faith," repeating over and over, "I'll wait, I'll wait, he will come, he will come" (10).

Nevertheless, the detective narrator insists that Matthai was a genius, not merely a deluded fool. For he rightly recognized the persistence of an evil which continued long after his colleagues had closed the case. He "fathomed the factors of reality which were hidden to the rest of us, fathomed them to such an extent that he broke through the theories and assumptions which tripped us up and penetrated close to those laws which we ordinarily never get at, and which keep the world in motion. Only close to them, of course" (160). Striking parallels between this novella and The Turn of the Screw, according to Heilman, reinforce his view that the ghosts are real, evil entities and that the governess is a savior, albeit not a completely effective one.

Both stories, for example, feature "adults practicing the seduction of children...creating a kind of fidelity to the destroyer that seems to cut off an incipient sense of wrongness in the situation." There is, further,

an element of consent in the victim--not so much ignorance, though this cannot entirely be excluded, as a subtle knowingness or readiness for the proffered moves, a minute failure of an initial capacity to reject that might have saved the children in both the James and Durrenmatt stories (349-350).

Thus, Quint's "spoiling" of Miles can be compared to the killer's offers of candy. The children's secret meetings with the killer suggest

a half-willing participation in the suspect terms of the destructive relationship....In Durrenmatt the case is simpler than in James, but there is still evidence of a child's subtle sensing of illegitimacy in the enterprise and yet having a virtual unbreakable commitment to it (352).

Even more interestingly, however, Heilman discerns in both novellas the pathos of a child's only partial consent to the threatening evil. Here the comparisons are striking.

...in two of the four children presented by the stories, there is a faint falling short of total acceptance that adds a strange vibrancy to the character; in presenting this, both authors manage a contrast and yet urge it so little that one may scarcely feel it the first time around. Both Flora and Annemarie are, as far as the overt evidence goes, most unreservedly attracted to their secret associates; in them we detect no sense of duplicity in the situation, no counter-impulse to hesitate, doubt, or withdraw. But in Miles the governess detects signs of a despair that indicates unusual awareness of the nature of his engagement; and she feels in him some willingness to come toward her as a helper, some incompleteness in the fidelity to Quint, some faint symptom of resistance to the lure of the demonic. In )The Pledge( the killer has extraordinary success in getting the cooperation of his victims, in securing their maintenance of a secrecy without which the preparatory rendezvous could not continue. But Gritli Moser, the victim whose death is the starting point of the novelette, had, even while continuing to meet the killer, evaded his injunction of secrecy by telling a close friend a `fairy tale' about meeting a `giant' and by drawing a symbolic picture that revealed some important aspects of the killer's identity. As with Miles, the impulse to independent action, the minimal blind man's feeling toward safety, falls far short of establishing protection against the danger behind the proffered and desired sweets. But what is important for us is that two writers, in dealing with such a situation, distinguish between the child who succumbs wholly to the lure of the demonic and the one whose yielding to temptation is ever so subtly qualified by the faint stirring of an imperfect desire to make possible a rescue. In making the distinction James further strengthens our sense that he is observing human responses in actual beings in an objective situation (352-353).

Heilman finds that "Duerrenmatt and James are even alike in their imagination of the evil enemy." The psychopath and Quint, of course, are similar in social position. Durrenmatt's psychopath "hates women and seeks revenge against them," while Quint and Jessel "want to `get hold of' the children and make them share their own infernal `torments'..." The "demonic lures" of both Durrenmatt's killer and James's ghosts can be seen as

the pleasing facade of the revengefulness which both writers detect as central in the evil beings and which both see as creating a need to destroy: in one case physical life, in the other, spiritual life (351-352).

Heilman also points out striking similarities between the final appearance of Jessel at the lake and the failure of the killer to appear with Annemarie in the dale before the eyes of Matthai and his colleagues. There is, first of all,

the general resemblance in symbolic decor: both authors have chosen a scene where fertility images are dominant and have introduced into it images of death or decay--the demonic intrusion into the garden. In )The Pledge(, the clearing in the woods is also the town's refuse dump, and in )The Turn of the Screw(, more subtly, Flora plucks and holds onto an `ugly' spray of `withered fern'... (353).

Even more importantly, however, according to Heilman, in each case the main character's vision of evil appears to be disconfirmed, even though the vision is true.

Each scene is the moment of triumph for the `savior' character, but the triumph is ironically undercut by the course of events. The governess is sure that Flora has been consorting with the ghost of Miss Jessel; Flora is found exactly where the governess conjectures, and then, to complete the victory, Miss Jessel materializes across the pond. But Mrs. Grose cannot see the apparition, comforts the child, and doubts the governess almost to the point of turning entirely against her. In )The Pledge( Matthai has a number of police with him to surround the clearing where Annemarie goes to meet `the wizard,' as she calls the killer; Matthai is utterly certain that the killer, whom he has long awaited, will now arrive and be captured; but he never shows up, and eventually the officers all turn against Matthai, treating him as if he were the victim of a hallucination. In each story there is a `seer' who has caught sight of an evil being but who, when this being does not become the palpable presence required by ordinary eyes, is rejected by those who go only on immediate sensory evidence (353-354).

Finally, the questionable morality of Matthai's plan to use an innocent child as "bait," according to Heilman, is similar to the failings of the governess-- particularly, her "go-it-alone hubris which, we cannot doubt, reduces the effectiveness that added help might have given her battle." We see in both cases, Heilman suggests, not the portrayal of a self-deluded mental case but rather

the possibility of corruption in the pursuit of a meritorious goal. The relation to James is that both writers sense the subtle interplay of devotion and egotism in the rescuer of others; many things go under in the determination to master the problem....The governess faces the fact that she may be mad..,and Matthai knows that he is regarded as insane; near the climax he `sensed' that his `insane expectations' would be fulfilled....But the point here is that similarities in the authors' management of the savior characters strengthen our sense that a self-consciously heroic quality, a certain excessiveness, a vehement, at times frantic style, self-will, and tension in the governess are signs not of disorder but of a normal, imperfect human being's response to the pressure of enormous difficulties (351).

The parallels which Heilman points out are certainly striking. They suggest, however, an interpretation considerably less laudatory of the governess than Heilman's famous 1948 article, and this point Heilman does not make. Also, Heilman does not consider a highly plausible alternative explanation of the similarities he cites--namely, that Durrenmatt used The Turn of The Screw as a source in the construction of his novella. If he did so, he could certainly have changed the material considerably in the process of incorporating it into his own creation. The fact, therefore, that Durrenmatt's detective pursues a truly existing killer would not prove that James's heroine pursues objectively existing ghosts. It would be reasonable to assume that a writer as erudite as Durrenmatt had read The Turn of the Screw. The possibility of such deliberate conscious or unconscious incorporation is, accordingly, very real.

B. Feuerlicht

Ignace Feuerlicht takes a somewhat similar approach in "Erlkonig and The Turn of the Screw." Feuerlicht succinctly states his point in the first paragraph of his essay:

Although it can hardly be attempted to establish the direct `influence' of the widely known German ballad on James's story, a comparison of the two reveals a significant number of common traits and may deepen the understanding of both (68).

Feuerlicht thus appears to be presenting not a source study, but rather a consideration of the kind of "new evidence" which Heilman offered in his comparison of James and Durrenmatt¹. Feuerlicht, however, confuses the issue in two ways. First, he states that

...James in one of his prefaces, a post mortem to be sure, seems almost to point at Goethe's alluring kind of elves, whose daughters dance during the night: `Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are not "ghosts" at all, as we now know the ghost, but goblins, elves...if not...fairies, wooing their victims forth to see them dance under the moon' (68).

Such an allusion by James in a critical preface would seem to imply that he used the work as a source. Secondly, in discussing the "strong link between beauty and perversion" in The Turn of the Screw and Goethe's ballad, Feuerlicht makes the following statement:

An erotic relation between supernatural beings and a `lovely' as well as `loved' boy is, incidentally, also a motive in )A Midsummer-Night's Dream(, a link which perhaps may help to account for the curious similarity of names--Peter Quint and Peter Quince (73).

This "curious similarity of names" would seem to suggest that the Shakespearean play was used as a source. If the novelist's use of sources can explain why the novel and the play contain similar erotic material, why can this explanation not account for corresponding similarities between the novella and Goethe's ballad? There is, of course, another possible explanation which Feuerlicht does not consider--namely, that both Goethe and James used A Midsummer Night's Dream as a source. That possibility casts serious doubt on interpretations of either work which are based on similarities to the other work. It is possible that both James and Goethe used the same material but in very different ways.

Most of the similarities Feuerlicht cites appear too general to shed light on the interpretation of either work--in this respect his essay is inferior to Heilman's. We are told, for example, that

the story and the ballad...have the same basic theme: An evil spirit tries to get hold of a beautiful child whom an adult tries to protect. At the end, the child dies mysteriously in the arms of his protector (68).

We are also reminded of the "sudden and mysterious death" of a child in each work and of the "abrupt ending" of each (74). Similarly, two biographical details are presented which, although interesting, shed no great light on the interpretation of either literary work:

Before writing his story, James `was charmed by a young boy....The child, aged six or seven, had eyebrows six inches long. Goethe was likewise inspired to his ballad by the beautiful body of a six-year-old boy, the little Fritz Stein, whom he admired and whom he took out one evening on a horseback ride (73).

Feuerlicht's most important point--that the supernatural entitles are real--is assumed in regard to both stories but proven in regard to neither. Feuerlicht's most cogent argument is overstated and far from conclusive:

The death of a healthy child from mere mental shock seems...to be such a rare occurrence in medical history as to make it almost as unbelievable as the existence of evil ghosts (74).

Feuerlicht does, however, point to an interesting parallel in the critical reception of the two works:

The Turn of the Screw( has achieved its great popularity as a ghost story. Yet some critics do not believe in James' ghosts, and explain them as hallucinations of the frustrated and perverted governess, who alleges seeing those ghosts. This is parallel to the reception of `Erlkonig,' which achieved its great fame as a naive ballad in which the evil king of the elves kills the innocent little boy, but which most critics have interpreted as based on the hallucinations of the sick child (68-69).

Comparison of the critical reception of two or more literary works can lead to valuable insights about the works themselves, about a particular period of literature or about literature in general, about the literary criticism of certain periods, or about the broader cultural milieu from which such criticism proceeds. Feuerlicht, however, unfortunately does not pursue any of these lines of development.

C. Booth

Wayne C. Booth adopts a more fruitful approach in The Rhetoric of Fiction. Here he takes note of other works to explain not The Turn of the Screw itself but much of the criticism of the novella.

Booth--like Jones, Hoffmann, and others--sees the governess as generally reliable, although not perfect:

I may as well begin by admitting--reluctantly since all of the glamour is on the other side--that for me James's conscious intentions are fully realized: the ghosts are real, the governess sees what she says she sees. What she sees disturbs her--as well it might. She is naive, innocent, human, decidedly inconscient about a lot of things she ought to be aware of; she is no paragon of wisdom or even of integrity. But she behaves about as well as we could reasonably expect of ourselves under similarly intolerable circumstances (314).

That so many critics have thought otherwise Booth takes as an example of a frequent error in twentieth-century criticism--namely, the fact that "the hunt for hidden symbols and ironies has been carried too far." Anent this, Booth cites Henry Miller's rejection of Edmund Wilson's inappropriate praise for a supposedly "skillful ironic portrait" in the Tropic books, Mary McCarthy's "amusing attack" on "the search by a Freshman English class for hidden meanings in a story of hers, when in actuality `the whole point of this story was that it really happened,'" and Saul Bellow's cautions against "deep reading" (367-369).

These critical excesses are inevitable, Booth contends, because of the nature of so much twentieth century fiction--e.g., Kafka and Joyce--"where the ironies are piled, thick and deep" (368). Moreover, these authors have influenced our reading processes to such an extent that such continuing critical excesses are inevitable.

Once on this road we cannot turn back; we cannot pretend that things are as simple as they once seemed. We may commit absurdities, questioning not only the honest little governess, but moving up on the scale of intended reliability to take in Nelly Dean (the newly discovered `villainess' of Wuthering Heights), Clarissa (not quite the angelic creature she once seemed), and even the most obviously omniscient and reliable narrators. We are not stopped by the most explicit rhetoric. When Cervantes labors to place his woeful knight as a blind (though lovable) fool, we simply ignore him: the Don is really a Christian Saint, a great Ironic Hero whom Cervantes himself does not fully understand (369).

Other critics, of course--most notably, Heilman in his 1947, 1948, and 1961 essays--have attempted to explain what they perceived as widespread biases on the part of critics. However, if we compare Booth's approach to that of Heilman and others, we discern an important difference which we might interpret as an accentuation of the trend toward viewing literature as a self-referential world. For Booth does not attribute these biases to philosophical or cultural preconceptions but to the specifically literary conventions to which these critics have been exposed.

D. West

We can see further evidence of this trend toward seeing literature as a self-referential world in the structure of Muriel West's A Stormy Night With The Turn of the Screw. For this work of literary criticism--really a hybrid mixture of fiction and criticism of fiction--is itself a novella the structure of which mirrors the structure of the novella it critiques. For West's critical speculations are presented in the form of a manuscript written by an anonymous critic to an "old friend and classmate, Baldy Twitchell" (vii) and edited by the anonymous critic's "discoverer and annotator who signs himself merely by initials-- H.K.Y." (vii). This critic's work and the comments made by H.K.Y. are presented to us, along with the additional comments about both the anonymous critic and H.K.Y., by the purchaser of a "box of miscellaneous old books bought at auction" (ix). Moreover, the anonymous critic's work is a narrative of his sequential speculations throughout a Christmas eve night and early Christmas morning in an old country house. Furthermore, H.K.Y. tells us he discovered this narrative "in the secret compartment of an antiquated brass and mahogany desk--found in the attic of an old house on W n Square" (xi). Moreover, the critic toward the end of the work claims to encounter the governess. Whether this is an hallucination, a dream, a tongue-in-cheek account, or a use of figurative language is not entirely clear. It follows other events faithfully recorded by the critic in which events first considered supernatural were shown to have natural causes. Consider this one amusing and representative example:

... I don't know how long I meditated, but the storm broke into my reverie with new violence--sparks and ashes spewed from the fireplace as before, the lamp alternately flickered and flared, and a big dead branch rapped with such force on the windowpane that, when another icy gust tore through the house, blowing my papers all everywhere and waking the cat from its curled-up on the hearth, I wondered if the pane had been broken. But the window was just as tight as the governess found it at the end of Chapter 17. If the lamp had gone out, I believe I should have expected the cat to tell me, just as Miles told the governess: `It was I who blew it, dear!' I realized directly that the tearing came from the rear of the house. The cat stretched and yawned--quite indifferent to any horrid demonic presence that might have come in with the wind. I made at once for the back of the house, and the cat went right along--sensing the chance to take advantage of someone's going to the kitchen. I was hungry myself. I shut the wide-open door and bolted it. Then I was led through what seemed to be seventeen cats until I had lit a candle and crossed over to the icebox (13).

Thus, some of the experiences of the anonymous critic parallel those of the anonymous governess. His cogitations as to the meaning of the literary work mirror her speculations about the meaning of the "story" at Bly. His manuscript is kept in a locked drawer by H.K.Y. and then transcribed by another narrator, just as the governess's manuscript is kept by Douglas in a locked drawer and later transcribed and presented to us by another narrator, one of Douglas's friends. Our perception of the critic's account is qualified by the annotations of H.K.Y., and our perception of both the anonymous critic and H.K.Y. are qualified by the comments of the narrator who purchases the manuscript at auction; similarly, our perceptions of the governess's account are qualified by the background material given by Douglas, and our perceptions of both the governess and Douglas are modified by the context as related by the third narrator, Douglas's guest.

In chapter 2 of this study I discussed Heywood Broun's essay as a hybrid literary form partaking of the qualities of both literary criticism and fiction. Broun's essay purportedly detailed his own psychological reactions to the novella but in so overstated a manner that his essay must be considered at least partly fiction. West's work, of course,--with the relationships among its narrators mirroring the relationships among James's narrators--must be considered infinitely more sophisticated than Broun's. Furthermore, because of this complex mirroring of literary structures, West's work more than Broun's can be seen as a product of structuralism--particularly of the structuralist view of literature as a self-referential universe. Broun's work, on the other hand, can more realistically be seen as a product of phenomenology. He is driven to a semi-fictional expression not to mirror literary structures but to experience and make us experience the particular brand of terror he feels James intended to convey.

E. Solomon

Erich Solomon's "The Return of the Screw" is a hybrid of a different form, a work not of fiction but of satire--specifically a spoof on the criticism of the story, "the classic controversies" and "the many refinements of Freudian, mythic, or pastoral readings James' story has received" (237). To critique the critics, of course, is itself an act of criticism of the story. By parodying the critics Solomon at least implies something about the novella--that it ought to be read more simply and straightforwardly, perhaps--although Solomon does not tell us straightforwardly what he considers a straightforward reading to be. Thus, in the act of mocking others, he commits the very sin which has aroused his scorn; and his criticism mirrors the criticism he writes about in a manner faintly analogous to the way in which West's novella mirrors the novella it critiques.

Solomon's thesis--that Mrs. Grose is the jealous villainess who deliberately drives the governess crazy--was later argued seriously by the psychiatrist C. Knight Aldrich, M.D. That Solomon is not serious becomes apparent as we ponder his overstatements--e.g.,

...this article is definitive and provides the one incontrovertible explanation for the strange happenings at Bly. Never again need there be another explication of )The Turn of the Screw( (238).

Solomon then proceeds to tell us how "Sherlock Holmes...would have cleared up the horrible crimes at Bly--for crimes they were--in an instant" by reflecting that Mrs. Grose, who has reason to be jealous of the governess, is the uncorroborated source of so much of the governess's information. We are told that "even Dr. Watson" (238)--later, "even Lestrade or Gregson" (245)--could have quickly perceived the truth which has eluded so many critics. We are invited to "read the governess' story with the care we would apply to, say, The Hound of the Baskervilles and watch the incredible become elementary" (238).

At least one of the functions of literature, of course, is entertainment, and Solomon's essay is certainly entertaining. As a matter of fact, critics who dislike James and Jamesian criticism might find Solomon superior to the novelist himself in this regard.

F. Vaid

Krishna Baldev Vaid approvingly quotes Heilman's contention "`that a great deal of unnecessary mystery has been made of the apparent ambiguity of the story'" (122). He thus agrees with Booth's contention that many critics have misunderstood the story. However, while Booth attributes this misunderstanding to the influence of so many inherently ambiguous twentieth century narratives--e.g., the works of Kafka and Joyce--Vaid explains it as a failure to see The Turn of the Screw in the context of the entire Jamesian canon with its many other first person narrators. Vaid's criticism is thus frankly authorial. He assumes--in contrast to the New Critics, for example--that an element in one literary work can be better understood if considered in reference to other works by the same author. We can see here some reflection of the structuralist view of literature as a self-referential universe. Each author's canon is considered, in a sense, to be a distinct world with its own rules and criteria of meaning. Underlying such authorial criticism, it seems to me, is the assumption that we interpret a literary work by apprehending the author's conscious or unconscious intentions.

Vaid also, in seeking to apprehend these intentions, considers Wilson's argument "that in the New York Edition James placed `The Turn of the Screw' not among the ghost stories but between The Aspern Papers and The Liar" (93). Vaid disputes the significance of this placement but appears to accept Wilson's assumption that James's conscious or unconscious reasons for such a placement are relevant to the interpretation of the story.

It is true that all the other ghostly tales in the canon--except `The Great Good Place,' which is not quite `ghostly'--are collected in Volume XVII, but the same volume also contains `The Birthplace' and `Julia Bride,' which are not ghost stories. In the preface to this volume James speaks of his `desire, amid these collocations, to place, so far as possible, like with like. May we not say that, in view of its length, James did not find it possible to group `The Turn of the Screw' with the other ghostly tales? For the same reason, perhaps, he could not place `Daisy Miller,' included in Volume XVIII, among his international tales, most of which are collected in Volumes XIII and XIV (93).

Vaid discusses a large number of Jamesian works to make two points: (1) that the governess is not "the main subject of the story"--i.e., we are mistaken to conclude "that the intention of the story is primarily to portray her"; (2) that the governess is "unambiguously reliable." To support the first contention Vaid surveys the Jamesian canon and concludes "that the narrator...is used primarily as a method of telling the story." In support of the second point Vaid surveys the canon "to establish the governess' reliability as a witness in the context of James's practice in his other first-person tales" (91-92).

Vaid's discussion of the canon is far from cursory. He makes perceptive comments about Jamesian narrators which other critics--most notably, Wilson--have categorized as unreliable and the creator's main concern:

...the narrator of `The Figure' is unreliable only in that his approach to Hugh Vereker's works is meant to strike us as being critically deficient, not because his facts are incorrect or distorted to suit his own purposes. This is reflected in the tone of the tale itself and corroborated by the notebooks and the preface....The narrator of `A Light Man'(1869) reveals himself cynically in the process of telling the story, but James makes no attempt to create an ambiguous impression by concealing his cynicism. The tale is cast in the form of a diary, and its tone is similar to that of Iago's soliloquies (92).

In The Aspern Papers, Vaid contends, "the intention of the author is unmistakably reflected in the very tone of the narrative and its denouement" (93).

`The Path of Duty' is a simple enough story; it is narrated by a woman who, impelled by mixed motives, leads Ambrose Tester and Lady Vadeleur to `the path of duty.' The irony of the tale, and of its title, is completely unambiguous, and it is as clear to the narrator as it should be to the reader.

Furthermore, says Vaid,

...the narrator, despite her role, is not the primary subject of the tale...since there is no ambiguity in `The Path of Duty,' I fail to understand how it supports Wilson's thesis that there is ambiguity in `The Turn of the Screw.' If anything, it should lead one to think by analogy that, had an ambiguity been intended in `The Turn of the Screw,' it would have been made at least as clear as it is in `The Path of Duty.'

Again in contrast to Wilson, Vaid finds "The Friends of the Friends" to be

quite an unambiguous tale; the `ambiguity' concerning the ghost is clearly meant to emphasize the jealousy of the narrator....Again, while introducing the narrative, the first narrator remarks: `She writes sometimes of herself, sometimes of others, sometimes of the combination. It's under this last rubric that she's usually most vivid....This remark shows that `The Friends of the Friends' also is not primarily a characterization of the narrator, who is functioning at the most both as narrator and as participant (94-95).

Vaid thus agrees with Wilson regarding the relevance of considering the entire canon in order to understand The Turn of The Screw but disagrees with Wilson concerning particular works and what they mean for The Turn of the Screw.

In his discussion of the story itself, Vaid is very close to Jones. Vaid contends that the prologue, with its two narrators, is intended to convey "the general idea that the ensuing tale is to be about two haunted children" (96) and to lead us to "identify ourselves with the receptive attitude of the suppositious company gathered round the fire on the Christmas Eve" (97). Its "most important function," however, is "to establish in the reader's mind an initial image of the governess's personality....This is done through the medium of Douglas..." Once again Vaid appeals to the totality of the canon, and once again, in doing so, he disagrees with Wilson:

(...there is no reason to suggest, as Wilson does, that `it is a not infrequent trick of James's to introduce sinister characters with descriptions that at first sound flattering.' As a matter of evidence, in no Jamesian prologue-tale is our impression of the second narrator in conflict with the impression given by the first narrator (97).)Vaid provides a detailed incident by incident discussion of the governess's narrative. Here he agrees with Jones that most, if not all, of the "ambiguity" in her account is there to heighten the reader's suspense as the reader discovers gradually, along with the governess, the full horror of the realities at Bly. Throughout the story, some evidence, such as the "beauty" of the children and their good behavior, seems to disconfirm the governess's interpretation.

The events, if we choose to look at them from one cursory angle, have an ostensibly innocuous surface; in this case, the reflections of the governess are bound to appear unwarranted and unconvincing (112).

Her conclusions, thus, from one vantage point, appear poorly supported. These conclusions, however,

are demonstrably meant to be taken as true. Her intuitive faculty is more highly developed than that of any other Jamesian narrator, except perhaps the narrator of )The Sacred Fount(, because without that James could not have worked the spell and the suspense he so remarkably has (122).

Similarly, the governess's inclusion in her narrative of her frequent doubts concerning her sanity and the correctness of her course testify to her honesty and balanced view of herself.

Had the point of the tale been to expose the baselessness of her suppositions and suspicions, the author would have made the governess do away with her doubts more expeditiously, made her suppress them, or, better still, not have endowed her with so many. On the contrary, he employs these doubts for the double purpose of characterizing the governess as a veracious reporter and of maintaining the suspense of the tale right up to the end (119-120).

Similar views have been expressed by other critics such as Jones and Eli Siegel.

Vaid's criticism focuses on technique rather than meaning. He does not, however, deny that its meaning is important. His "description," he tells us, "far from constricting the deeper meanings of the tale, should perhaps be the only point of departure for a fruitful probe into those deeper meanings" (122). But Vaid himself does not specify what those "deeper meanings" might be.

3. Ambiguity Intended to Convey Philosophical, Theological, or Psychological Themes

A. Trachtenberg

Stanley Trachtenberg, for example, accepts Rubin's arguments that Douglas and Miles are the same person and then proceeds to demonstrate how this shared identity functions as a vehicle for what Trachtenberg takes to be the novella's central moral message, the dreadfulness of secret sin and the overwhelming need for confession.

The real focus of the story, says Trachtenberg, is Miles, not the governess. The apparent centrality of the governess, he suggests, was James's technical way of solving "two salient" problems:

How to make his terror terrible enough, and how--since it depends principally upon withheld knowledge--to keep the mysterious from becoming merely murky . . . . He wanted to avoid reducing his evil to the particular and yet maintain enough substance to give it conviction. To do this, he had first to objectify the evil in emotionally believable terms. The reader's imagination would build from there. The governess' reaction provided just such an objectification, embodying the evil by presenting it as an effect rather than a direct phenomenon. The reader could experience her horror first hand at the same time as he was thrust one remove from its cause (181-82).

According to Trachtenberg, the novella is the story of "the guilt . . . of a boy whose unspecified corruption, personified as sinister specters, festered as he attempted to conceal it" (182). Trachtenberg contrasts Miles, who is continually "wanting to expose his own guilt and lacking the courage to do so" with Flora, whose "eventual damnation" as she "symbolically dies, an old woman," occurs because she "lacks entirely these moments of self doubt" (181). Miles's "recurrent insomnia," on the other hand,

. . . exposes a conscience corroded by the difficulty he experiences in trying to articulate his guilt. It is at this moment that the governess, detecting the first sign of his `consenting consciousness,' almost succeeds in obtaining his confession. He forestalls her by blowing out the candle, and thus consigns himself to a darkness of the soul from which it requires a lifetime to emerge (181).

In the prologue, Trachtenberg correctly points out, we see

. . . a man engaged in a fierce moral struggle. The confession does not come easily. The constricting fear, which had marked the pattern of a lifetime, is difficult to overcome; the continuing urge to postpone exposure is tempting. Even as he reaches out for it, Douglas' salvation threatens to recede, the story to remain untold. There is a final hesitation, against which he appeared, to the acute narrator, `almost to appeal for aid. He had broken a thickness of ice, the formation of many a winter; he had reasons for a long silence' (181).

Consequently, his story is

. . . a story not only of the corruptibility of children, but of the continued guilt of silence, which results in a symbolic deathbed confession, while the attending guests perform a priestlike absolution around the cleansing fire of the hearth (182).

B. Clair

John A. Clair also attempts to demonstrate how a particular narrative method is intended to convey a certain theme. Clair focuses on

James's utilization of a formal ironic device of the stage--dramatic irony--by which actors or characters are shown to be `blind' to facts known by the spectators and readers . . . . His consistent use of dramatic irony in successive scenes very often provides a complex ironic vehicle for a cumulative ironic effect (x).

The purpose of these "formal or functional ironic effects" is the conveyance of a particular view of human life, which Clair terms "thematic irony" (x). Clair's criticism is authorial in that he attempts to understand the canon as a whole.

Clair's reading of The Turn of the Screw focuses on the governess's misinterpretation of those "intense anomalies and obscurities" which she witnesses. These misinterpretations, Clair suggests, are deliberately abetted by the deceptive Mrs. Grose (37-58). So far, so good. Aldrich and Rees (to be discussed later in this chapter) have done some good work in removing the "saintly" Mrs. Grose from her pedestal. Other critics--for example, Cole and Cranfill and Clark, among others--have concentrated on likely misunderstandings in the governess's conversations with Mrs. Grose. And, of course, many critics have suggested that the governess in some way misinterprets what she sees (Bontly, for example, suggests that the apparitions may be innocuous spirits).

Clair's specific reconstruction of the events at Bly, however, is breathtaking in its implausibility. He suggests that the children's insane mother is hidden at Bly, attended by a male guardian, without the knowledge of the new and strange governess but with the full knowledge of the completely trusted Mrs. Grose. Thus, the two figures seen by the governess are this insane woman, when she periodically escapes, and her guardian, who then looks for her. Mrs. Grose's stories are designed to keep the strange new governess from learning the truth, so as to protect the family from embarrassment. She denies seeing Miss Jessel on the other side of the lake in order to keep Flora, as well as the governess, in the dark.

The numerous and overwhelming objections to this interpretation are too obvious to need a detailed statement; nevertheless, a few brief comments are in order. There is so little in the story to support this interpretation that Clair, in effect, has written his own story. The apparitions in James's story quickly and mysteriously disappear--they do not leave the scene the way real people would. Furthermore, it would be highly unlikely in Victorian Britain that an insane woman would be assigned a male guardian. The employer, moreover, if he were so desirous of secrecy in such a matter, would be unlikely to leave the insane woman at Bly while placing an unknowledgeable stranger "in supreme authority." Aldrich has succinctly summed up some of the most telling objections to Clair's interpretation:

. . . it depends on the assumption that the uncle keeps Miss Jessel and the children in the same household and at the same time sets up elaborate precautions against their encountering one another--and that he informs his housekeeper of the circumstances, but conceals them from the housekeeper's superior. The motivation for this behavior is absent, and I do not believe that James would have based his plot on such a contrived set of circumstances (377).

C. Sharp

The Confidante in Henry James by Sister M. Corona Sharp, O.S.U. is, to some extent, a psychoanalytic study which focuses on the psyche of James himself. Sharp claims that his use of widowed or maiden older women as confidantes is at least partially traceable to the "matriarchal system" of the novelist's family of origin and its lifelong effects on his unconscious.

The mother's powerful influence on the entire family and on Henry in particular is related in Leon Edel's biography. It was a tense control, masked by loving devotion, which in the biographer's eyes, preferred the second son to the first and was responsible for the eventual breakdown of the younger children. The power-seeking mothers of James's fiction are the unconscious recreations of his mother's concealed force; for consciously James could only idealize her (xiii).

The resulting "crippling in the boy's development toward emotional maturity," suggests Sharp, goes far toward explaining both his lifelong bachelorhood and his asexual friendships with older women such as Edith Wharton and Grace Norton. These psychodynamic realities also partially explain his pervasive use of such women as confidantes to the protagonists in his fiction, although Sharp emphasizes James's debts to confidants in fictional works such as Wuthering Heights and his "study and practice of the drama" which ". . . did much to influence the techniques in his fiction . . . the majority of his confidantes appear in works written during or after his dramatic years, 1890-1895" (xii).

Sharp's approach is authorial in that she surveys the entire Jamesian canon. "In each case," she tells us in her introduction,

the type, the character, and the technical function is investigated, and parallels and contrasts are noted . . . . Each confidante contributes to the total picture, and all are integrally related to the narrative method of the author (xxx).

Sharp finds that her psychoanalytic insights are more directly applicable to some confidantes than to others. Sharp sees in Mrs. Grose "the kindness of [James's] motherly friends" (xxi) but then discusses her as a technical narrative device without further reference to psychoanalytic insights. Accordingly, we have chosen to include Sharp's study not with the psychoanalytic studies of the period but rather with those studies which attempt to describe how a particular technical narrative method of engendering ambiguity is intended to convey a thematic message. It is easy to see why Sharp would not find in Mrs. Grose a convincing example of James's unconscious mother fixation. In the first place, Sharp does not see the hostility toward the governess which Aldrich perceives. Secondly, Mrs. Grose seems markedly different from James's mother both in social standing and in a lack of aggressiveness which makes her easy prey for the governess's bullying.

Sharp reads the novella straightforwardly as a tale of supernatural evil so profound that it eludes rational understanding. Consequently, she holds that James deliberately, as he asserts in the Preface, sought ambiguity,

. . . to give the sense `Of their being, the haunting pair, capable, as the phrase is, of everything--that is of exerting, in respect to the very worst action small victims so conditioned might be conceived as subject to' (46).

Furthermore, "the . . . opacity of Mrs. Grose's perceptions is functional in safeguarding ambiguity," says Sharp (46), because "her character presents the stolidity of the English serving class as a foil to the governess's acute sensibility" (41). She functions as

the chief means of dramatization . . . . In the course of their relation . . . the governess comes to lean more and more on her confidante, and without her substantial support one feels that the young woman would have collapsed. But as this support is seen to be qualified by a latent opposition to the governess, the housekeeper reflects the conflicts and ambiguity of the whole nouvelle. . . (41).

Far from understanding depths of evil, Mrs. Grose can only perceive superficial manifestations such as Flora's language or Miles's possible theft of letters.

. . . as an English servant she clings to manners, the external elements that make for security within the social system. When these are disturbed the universe of Mrs. Grose crashes . . . . `He stole letters!' she reiterates, trying to make an impression with her keenness . . . . It would certainly be an offense for a little gentleman to steal letters; and Mrs. Grose is satisfied with that . . . (45).

D. Wright

Walter F. Wright finds insoluble ambiguities in the story. He suggests, like Enck, that these ambiguities have been deliberately effected to reflect important truths about the human condition--most importantly that we can never know the whole truth and yet must act in contexts where mistaken action can bury us in guilt. James termed the tale a fairy tale, according to Wright, because of its "universal implications" (178). The governess's plight is our plight; her ghosts are our ghosts because "the governess's concern about them is symbolic of our own philosophic predicaments" (181).

This dilemma concerns the ghosts' "relation to the children" (181). Wright maintains that the economy of the story requires us to accept the existence of the ghosts.

Unless one tries to argue that everything was a concoction of a distraught mind, one has to begin by accepting certain premises, among them the possibility that ghosts can exist . . . . Nothing of philosophic significance can be made of them as obvious fantasies of a neurotic mind . . . . The governess reports that she sees them . . . . As she surveys the happenings years later, when she is actually recording from memory, she gives to the appearance of the ghosts the same credence as to other things her eyes saw. If we accept these other phenomena, we cannot well exempt the ghosts (181).

The ghosts' "relation to the children," however, poses a terrible ethical problem for the governess and for us as we attempt to judge her.

If the children are already in their power, the governess is morally responsible for counteracting their machinations; indeed, she should take any risk, for all is lost if she does not succeed. If, on the other hand, the children are ignorant of their existence, the governess has no right to unveil their eyes to such evil: `. . . who would ever absolve me, who would consent that I should go unhung, if by the faintest tremor of an overture, I were the first to introduce into our perfect intercourse an element so dire' . . . . Hence her dilemma. If the children would freely confess to their association with the ghosts, her moral course would be clear. But how can she obtain from them a confession they decline to offer without herself speaking of the `element so dire'? If she does speak first--even if she then secures a confession from the children, who may see only because she has helped them to see--she will never know whether she has offered salvation to captive spirits or whether she is beyond absolution for her sin (181-82).

Wright, like the other critics we have been considering, offers a detailed analysis of the narrative method James has employed to produce this all-pervasive ambiguity.

Wright lists those elements in the plot which have given rise to "three perspectives":

At one extreme is the critic who sees the governess as a virtually angelic being fighting against evil, and at the other is the antipuritan who would make of her a self-appointed vicegerent of the Lord, driven by a misguided frenzy and guilty of bringing evil into a garden formerly idyllic. Distinct from the second, yet convinced that the governess is a doer of ill, are those who would make her out to be a sexually maladjusted spinstress, who unwittingly records in her first-person narrative the vagaries of a pathological mind (177).

None of these critics are merely wrong; James has deliberately constructed the story so that all three interpretations are supportable. "All three types of readers cite the same evidence, and on it all build up substantial superstructures of reason to prove their points" (177). Because the other two readings can be so easily supported, ". . . each of the three perspectives is . . . not compatible with economy in storytelling" (177). The wise reader does not exclusively embrace one of the three perspectives but instead recognizes the insoluble nature of the governess's dilemma and his own.

E. Shine

Muriel G. Shine also holds that the story is about the ethical problems of acting in the light of incomplete knowledge. However, Shine is far less sympathetic to the governess than Wright. While Wright holds that the ghosts are real and that the governess does the best she can under terribly difficult circumstances, Shine holds that the governess is an example of the wrong way to seek knowledge. "Fundamentally," says Shine,

the novelist is concerned with the governess' impulse to know and the relationship of that impulse to the attainment of self-knowledge. In a word, is it enough to desperately want knowledge in order to gain it? (133).

Shine's answer is no.

A prior condition for the acquisition of knowledge about others is self-knowledge, which, in turn, implies a recognition of human fallibility. The young governess is sadly deficient in this area. She never sufficiently questions the reality of the `danger' she senses: `I saw my service so strongly and so simply. I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most lovable . . . we were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger . . . . I was a screen--I was to stand before them. The more I saw, the less they would' (134).

Shine is reminiscent of Lydenberg in her suggestion that the governess acts as a conducting rather than protective screen--i.e., in her suggestion that the destruction occurs through the agency of the governess. Shine is like Firebaugh in her insistence on the importance of knowledge in this story. "For James," she says, "the inability to exercise the cognitive faculty is equated with moral insufficiency" (135). However, Shine's point is somewhat more complex than Firebaugh's simple indictment of the governess for "denial of knowledge." While Shine arraigns the governess for her failure to seek knowledge, she maintains that, by an ironic twist--a turn of the screw perhaps?--the children are destroyed by a perverse knowledge the governess forces on them.

The children do, in fact, `see,'--another instance of James's fascination with the theme of the reversal of roles. What the children finally come to `see' is the governess' warped personality.

Shine differs from most anti-governess critics in seeing the governess as a normal adolescent rather than as a pathological case. Shine's book is a study not of "haunted people" but rather of children in the Jamesian canon. Predictably, Shine sees Miles and Flora as two of many examples of "children . . . manipulated by adults . . . invariably . . . in the name of some higher ideal connected with the welfare of the child" (175). Interestingly, however, Shine sees the governess not as a typical manipulative adult but rather as an adolescent. Shine makes some of the same points psychoanalytic critics have made--referring, for example, to "her unrealistic infatuation with the mysterious and almost unknown guardian of the children" (136) and her "frantic effort to subdue and possess Miles" which arises from "a sexual fantasy" (92). Shine views these elements, however, in the light of developmental psychology rather than abnormal psychology. The above reactions, Shine tells us, are "surprisingly reminiscent of adolescents one has known" (136). In arguing this point, Shine considers the story itself--in New Critical fashion--and the total canon--in the manner of an authorial critic.

To reduce the governess merely to a `pathological liar' with an `unhinged fancy' robs the tale of its many dimensions. To elevate her to the role of `confessor' and `savior' with a `priestly' function attributes a frame of reference to the author which is questionable in the context of the whole body of his work . . . . A measured regard for her adolescent characteristics might very well have tempered the more extreme reactions to her (132-33).

Nevertheless, although Shine faults the governess for deplorable judgment, she does not categorically assert that the children are innocent. On the contrary, the inconclusive evidence presented

. . . serves as a commentary on the essential ambiguity of the human condition and the interchangeability of appearance and reality in a world where most questions do not have final and irrevocable answers (139).

This "essential ambiguity" is the result of a meticulous choice of incidents comprising the plot.

The reader can never, with any degree of certainty, say what the children really are, only what they could possibly be. Miles could be the soul of corruption, and, by the same token, he could be a typical little Victorian gentleman who minds his manners, is precocious enough to call his governess `my dear,` and naughty enough to be expelled from school. Flora could be the essence of depravity, but she could, just as well, be an absorbed child playing with her boat, an anxious little girl leaving her bed in search of her governess, or a badly frightened infant responding to incomprehensible and threatening behavior on the part of the adult who cares for her . . . . [James] succeeded because Miles and Flora are credible as Victorian upper-class children; their credibility filters through the distorting screen of the governess' perception of them. Because we sense their normality, we can accept the idea that their behavior could have a deeper and more ominous significance (138).

This ambiguous situation and the adolescent response to it are presented to convey a theme of universal significance.

Virtue and vice coexist in each of us. The quality of the individual perception is what truly counts, for both good and evil reside in the eye of the beholder. Appropriately the author chose two children and an adolescent to dramatize his theme of the co-presence of virtue and vice in one entity, because it is a truth of human nature which must be assimilated before the claim to maturity can be made (139).

Moreover, this theme is conveyed to the reader in a manner more immediate and powerful than mere intellectual presentation. For the ambiguity of the evidence, suggests Shine, puts the reader in the same position as the governess. The reader is forced to judge the situation and the children in the light of his own experience just as the governess is forced to do (138). Here, Shine, like Willen, is a reader-response critic. This reader-response criticism, however, does not depend on a detailed analysis of the psychology of a particular reader but rather upon the analysis of the text itself as its lacunae invite constructions from readers with diverse psychologies. We think immediately of Felman's later contention that the structure of the story forces the reader to duplicate the psychological responses of one or more of the characters. Thus, the story serves as a touchstone of the reader's maturity. The reader either judges simplistically like the adolescent governess or apprehends the situation's complexity and irreducible ambiguity a la critics such as Enck.

F. Ward

J. A. Ward also sees the story as deliberately ambiguous and contends that the purpose of the ambiguity is to convey certain philosophical themes. Ward, however, is not completely successful because some of his points are implied rather than stated specifically. His interpretation, consequently, tends to break down into two distinct and only loosely related readings. By making the implied points specific, however, we can construct from his work a unified and persuasive reading of the story.

Ward, like so many other critics of this period, is authorial in his approach. His understanding of Jamesian evil is arrived at through consideration of a large number of Jamesian works; and he places the governess in chronological perspective among James's other protagonists.

As Ward reads the canon, the Jamesian philosophy of evil "represents, if not the synthesis, certainly the coexistence of a Puritan concern with evil and a transcendentalist concern with experience" (16). Ward approvingly quotes Siwek's definition of evil:

. . . all that opposes the intrinsic finality of a being . . . all that hinders the being's full development, all that thwarts its tendencies, all that resists the drive from the depths of that being toward full expansion, toward that completion which it would attain to in its ideal type, the archetype of its own nature. . . (vii).

This "implicit identification of good with growth," says Ward, marks James as "fundamentally in the tradition of nineteenth century romanticism" (vii-viii). "Growth," in the Jamesian world, requires a plethora of experience. Ward cites examples such as the pathetic end of John Marcher in "The Beast in the Jungle" and

the exhortation of Strether to Bilham in )The Ambassadors(--`Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. . . (14-15).

Consequently, "evil in James usually takes the form of . . . the malign intervention of one person in the life of another" (vii) to restrict experience and thus restrict growth. James's preoccupation with evil is Puritan, Ward contends, but Puritan with a novel twist: "James tends to concentrate on the good man's reaction to evil, rather than on the guilty man's obsession with his own sin" (9). In other words, "James alters the traditional Puritan consideration of evil by focusing on the sinned-against rather than the sinner . . . " (14). The main reason for this shift of emphasis, suggests Ward, is that "the evil character in James is almost never reflective" (10). We see the influence of transcendentalism in the Jamesian assumption that evil "derives from the fundamental human condition of limited perception" (11).

The above underlying "malign intervention" is the essence of evil, not specific actions or omissions considered in themselves. This "is related to James's notion that phenomena are only important when the private consciousness contains them" (17). Thus, a specific act only becomes evil as the victim suffers its constricting effects. Both these effects and the actor's motives are pervasive and mysterious, extending to deep subconscious depths where human beings accept or reject spiritual growth. Thus, evil is always much more than any particular concrete manifestation; James often makes this point, Ward suggests, through ambiguity and indetermination.

When James converts the concrete fact of evil into a kind of impalpable essence, the effect is not to diminish its reality but to intensify it by making it mysterious--even vaguely supernatural. Even when the nature of a crime is specified, like the duplicity of the Bellegardes or the parasitism of Gilbert Osmond, the sense of the evil far transcends the recorded facts, for as the evil impresses itself on the consciousness of the victim, the reader is compelled to realize its full force through the emotional reaction of the sinned-against. Sometimes, as in `The Turn of the Screw,' the precise nature of the offense is not told us (16).

The "fairy tale" elements which James referred to in the Preface, serve, says Ward,

. . . to give . . . universal implications . . . .  To reveal that beneath the impeccable manners and sophisticated dialogue of his characters there lurked the most basic of conflicts, that between good and evil . . . (16).

The governess, according to Ward,

resembles those other outsiders or agents of good who frequent the fiction of James's middle period. Usually characterized as emotionally and intellectually inadequate, they stand for human imperfection. They are objective portraits of James's conception of the ineptitude and weakness of good in a world dominated by evil. In addition, they represent a harsher evaluation of the romantic view of life, based on illusion rather than good sense--a view shared by James's earlier American protagonists, who do not, however, significantly cause ill to others (72).

Like Lydenberg, Ward suggests that the governess "helps to damn" the children. Her overprotective domination--culminating in her brutal encounter with Flora by the lake and with Miles in the dining room--drive the children into the arms of the ghosts. Ward sees the governess as possessed by pride and concerned almost exclusively with herself. Like Goddard, he sees her motivated by a desire to perform some heroic service to the uncle "because of a foolish romantic attachment" (68).

It is here that the unity of Ward's interpretation seems to break down. For the governess, as Ward describes her, seems to be not merely imperfect but the very essence of Jamesian evil as Ward has defined it. It would seem logical for Ward to suggest that the ghosts are her hallucinations, as Goddard does, or that they represent cosmic evil which materializes through the mediumistic powers of this self-deceived but evil woman, as Lydenberg does. The governess, with her unreflective and self-serving smothering of the children, is far too exact a representation of Jamesian evil as Ward has defined it to be merely an ineffective fighter against an evil whose primary manifestation is elsewhere.

This, however, is Ward's view. He criticizes the governess for initially romanticizing Bly as "an imagined garden of Bliss" instead of recognizing "the ugly real ghosts" (68). He faults her "deficiencies" in failing to grasp sooner the corrupt assignations between the children and their infernal mentors.

For the most part, the children completely deceive her. She realizes too late that their `angelic' appearances conceal corrupted souls. Their various tricks and deceptions invariably succeed; little Miles is especially charming so that Flora can meet Miss Jessel (69).

Ward's insights can be complemented by Lydenberg's interpretation in which the ghosts materialize through the governess's mediumistic powers or West's reading in which the ghosts possess the governess rather than the children. The ghosts could also be seen as mysterious founts of evil emanating from the depths of the governess's subconscious. However, the unity of Ward's interpretation is vitiated, it seems to me, if the ghosts are not, in some way interpreted as "her" ghosts.

G. Krook

Dorothea Krook also considers the story's ambiguity to be an irreducible part of its structure. Accordingly, she faults both Heilman and his polar counterparts-- Wilson and Goddard--for one-sided readings of the story. In Krook's view, both the theological and psychoanalytic readings call attention to essential elements in the story; consequently, both