The Turn of the Screw by Henry James Secondary Critics
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Course
ENGLISH 1265 (ENGL3015)
Institution
University Of Southampton (UOS)
Summarised, relevant information from academic sources to be used as secondary resources/critics in essays. Links and references to all critics with page numbers.
The Turn of the Screw Secondary Resources:
She believes the ghosts who have taken part in an illicit affair, wish to corrupt
the children and snatch away their innocence.
Writing on the cusp of modernism, Prose Suffused with melancholy , Straddling
Victorianism and Modernism
Originally serialised.
Psychological Realism
Narrator’s mental state is always called to attention.
The story remains in the fantastique: you have to decide if you believe in the
supernatural explanation of ghosts, or if you believe in the uncanny (natural)
explanation of madness.
We have no perspective outside of the governess’
Double Meaning embedded into it. James experimenting with modernism and
ambiguity. What is true, how do we detect meaning? The problems of gender
constraints. He’s manipulating the tropes of 18 -19 cent literature. Metatextual
th th
references=it’s a self aware text.
The problem of interpretation-who can we trust as we read? Use of frame
narrative is significant-we’re hearing a story read from a text of a governess who
has died. We are literally hearing her voice beyond the grave. Layers of distance
of the text complicating the way we interpret it.
James wants us to question the validity of the story-this is his way of
incorporating modernism?
She has a kind of self-importance.
Significantly, the governess is never named-a representation of all Victorian
women? Is the domestic sphere the only place for a woman to exert power?
Does she need to take on the saviour role? Or is she just creating it herself to
have some sense of agency?
See quote on lecture video. She doubts herself, she is suspicious of herself (the
ghost’s doing or does it allude to her state of mind?) she partially admits to
projecting this suspicion onto the children. We as the reader, are trapped within
the limited first person perspective.
The narrative shapes our response to the text-we try to uncover the truth.
Marvelous vs Uncanny explanation. YOU have to make that choice.
The search for truth drives the narrative. Finding pleasure in reason, discovering
the truth or experiencing sensation. Does pleasure come from closure? Or from
cliffhanger open to interpretation? That we have to create meaning for ourselves.
Turning the Screw of Interpretation
Shoshana Felman
p. 97
, The Turn of the Screw is not, in fact, a ghost story but a madness story, a study
of a case of neurosis: the ghosts, ac- cordingly, do not really exist; they are but
figments of the gov- erness's sick imagination, mere hallucinations and
projections symp- tomatic of the frustration of her repressed sexual desires
98
the critical interpretations have fallen into two camps: the "psychoanalytical"
camp, which sees the governess as a clinical neurotic deceived by her own
fantasies and destructive of her charges; and the "metaphysical," religious, or
moral camp, which sees the governess as a sane, noble saviour engaged in a
heroic moral struggle for the salvation of a world threatened by supernatural Evil
101
The critical interpretation, in other words, not only elucidates the text but also
reproduces it drama- tically, unwittingly participates in it
103
The one characteristic by which a "Freudian reading" is generally recognized is
its insistence on sexuality, on its crucial place and role in the text. The focal
theoretical problem raised by a psycho- analytical reading would thus appear to
be the definition of the very status of sexuality as such in a text. Wilson's
reading of The Turn of the Screw indeed follows this interpretative pattern of
accounting for the whole story in terms of the governess's sexual frustration: she
is in love-says Wilson-with the Master, but is unable to admit it to herself, and
thus obsessively, hysterically projects her own desires upon the outside world,
perceives them as exterior to herself in the hallucinated form of fantasmatic
ghosts.
Professor Amir Ali Nojoumian
Literary Schools
29 December 2015
th
Modern Realism: Elements of Modernism in Henry James’ Realist
Fiction.
https://www.academia.edu/26164385/
Modern_Realism_Elements_of_Modernism_in_Henry_Jamess_Realist_Ficti
on
To show the inner world of his characters’ minds, James developed his centre of
consciousness technique in which the story is narrated through the point of view
of one of the characters with little to no commentary from the omniscient
narrator.
Another major characteristic of modernist texts is their narrative ambiguity and
lack of closure. On the other hand though, the reader needs to determine
whether he should trust the text at all. This self-conciousness about narration
and other fictional techniques would become one of the clear signs of twentieth
century modernism.
Henry James has been an influential figure, first and foremost as an esteemed
realist, but also as one of the main forces behind literary modernism in its
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