The Turn of the Screw

This is one of those books that I hadn’t read despite it being mentioned pretty much every time someone called for a good ghost story. During our latest winter storm I decided it would be a good time to dive into it and for the most part I really liked it. It had excellent pacing and the story was trim, not a lot of extraneous detail. There’s the set up, which is folks gathered around a fire to hear a scary story, the prologue which puts our protagonist in place and then we’re off. Strangely the tale just ends and we never get back into the room with the fire. I wonder if James forgot or his editor or what, but those people never show up again. Kind of sloppy if you ask me.

And there’s that ending. Wow. It came on extra suddenly show more for me because I read it as a Project Gutenberg ebook which has a lot of publishing info at the back so it’s hard to tell exactly where the book ends. Is it me, or does everyone have to read the ending three times to get it straight? And by straight I mean bendy and weird and what?

Spoilers on the move -

I knew it was a psychological horror story going in and that there might be more to the story than what’s on the surface. I don’t want to go so far as to declare an unreliable narrator, but it’s close. Even if what Jane perceived wasn’t real, she believed that it was and to me, that’s not an unreliable narrator, merely a fallible one. Are there the ghosts of servants past haunting the old pile, or is Jane crazy? Does Miles have some sort of symbiotic connection to Peter Quint? Does getting Flora away from the place break hers to Miss Jessel? There are no concrete answers. Instead, James relies on the reader’s interpretation of some pretty unspecific information. For example, just why are these ghosts so evil and is their evil different now than it was in life? Both are branded as villains, but nothing is specifically stated about what they did exactly. It’s hinted that there was an illicit affair going on between them, very improper, and somehow because the children were aware of it, the knowledge corrupted them. Did that lead to Miles’s unknown crime that got him kicked out of school? And speaking of unfathomable and unresolved...what’s with the uncle’s condition that Jane never contact him about the kids? That’s just weird. The whole thing is weird and that’s what makes it fun.

The actual writing, I should warn you, is convoluted. James is fond of the very long sentence populated by many, many commas. At first it was a job getting into the rhythm of his writing, but reading out loud helped, something I find useful for older novels. As you might have guessed, if you’re the type of reader who needs everything explained and tied up neatly, The Turn of the Screw isn’t the ghost story for you. show less

“I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his perhaps being innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent, what then on earth was I?”

A young governess accepts a position in a beautiful estate in the English countryside, in Essex. The cosmopolitan uncle entrusts his niece and nephew into her hands and asks not to be disturbed under any circumstances. Bly is enormous, the acres endless, the house full of corridors and closed doors. Our unnamed narrator couldn’t be happier. Flora and Miles couldn’t be lovelier. And then, darkness arrives. A man standing on a tower, a woman in black show more standing by the lake. A strange song and a face at the window.

“I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.”

Having recently watched (for the tenth time…) the marvelous 1961 film The Innocents, I thought that it was time to read one of Henry James’ most controversial works once again. I always choose this as a part of my summer readings. Its sultry atmosphere soon becomes eerie, its underlying sensuality grows within an environment of secrets and charged sexual tension. Suffocating and enticing, cryptic and provoking. Challenging. Hungry. The questions are many. Is everything real? Is the young woman ‘’imagining things’’? Has she created a world of her own, projecting her frustrations upon the ‘’innocents’’? Or has she found herself in a whirlwind of lust and obsession orchestrated by two malevolent spirits who use the children as vessels and instruments? Each reader needs to draw his/her own conclusions. James is not a writer who provides every solution at the end of his works. Even daily, mundane issues and snapshots of ordinary life acquire a different ‘’colour’’ in each novel. The Turn of the Screw is in a league of its own.

“The summer had turned, the summer had gone; the autumn had dropped upon Bly and had blown out half our lights. The place, with its gray sky and withered garlands, its bared spaces and scattered dead leaves, was like a theater after the performance--all strewn with crumpled playbills.”

Whatever your expectations may be, James created one of the best - if not THE best- Gothic novels of all time. Unique descriptions, commanding atmosphere, a background full of contrasts and dark imagery. The idyllic estate that changes when night falls. Two charming, gifted children that seem rather fascinated with Death, a housemaid that seems to protect every secret of the house. The Turn of the Screw defined the Gothic genre and paved the way for the trope of the Haunted House that is still extremely popular. More than ever, in fact. Whispers, apparitions, murmurs, nightly windows, shadows, a troubled young woman who wants to help and understand. Add desire and a potential incestuous relationship lurking in the future and you have a timeless story.

I read this novella when I was 17. It frustrated me because I was impatient, wanting to have every answer delivered on a silver plate. We discussed the hell out of it in university and I fell in love. I understood that the majority of the finest books written create more questions when their final page is turned. It was this work that gave birth to my fascination with dubious closures. Now, no matter how many times I have read it, its magnetism stays strong.

And I am one of those who side with the heroine. I firmly believe that it was all true. There are many dark forces around us and beyond us. Who's to say for certain?

“I take up my own pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will.”

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less

I've read The Turn of the Screw in the past, and though I don't often re-read books, the recent Netflix adaptation inspired me to come back to it. And, it was an interesting experience. Henry James is a master of the uncanny and the eerie, when he chooses to be, and even all these years after The Turn of the Screw was first published, the sense of ungroundedness in this book is still such a powerful thing. All through the book, it's difficult to know what's real and what's not, who to trust and who can't be believed. And yet, from moment to moment, the discomfort the reader feels is built from just how realistically this story is presented. All these years later, that style and power remain undiminished.

This is one of those reads that, show more I suspect, can only truly be experienced to its full potential once. What I mean by that is that the first read has such incredible power--so many twists, eerie moments, and surprises--there's no way to unremember what you've once read. Even though I hadn't read this book for more than a decade, coming back to it was both familiar and unfamiliar--but I couldn't revisit that first reading experience, and the horror and fascination I felt upon first discovering it. Was it still a powerful, worthwhile read? Absolutely. It just wasn't the same as it once was. Perhaps that can be said for most books, but because of the eerie, unfolding progression of this book, I suspect it's more true for this book than most others.

This book is so well-known, what more can be said? If you haven't yet read this book, you should. show less

A horror classic. The story is conducive to so many readings; the most obvious question, that of the narrator's sanity, gives rise to two completely different but equally compelling narratives. There is a lot of complexity packed into this short novel, and it is clear why it continues to be of interest to literary critics and readers alike. Of course, it hails from the Victorian era, so you have to be willing to wade through the overly verbose inner monologue and the ludicrously heightened displays of emotion. These can make it a bit of a chore to read, but the bones of this story are rock-solid. And to be fair, it's hard to imagine the crucial atmosphere, full of traumatic secrets and implied confessions, remaining intact without the show more sense of aristocratic Victorian propriety.

I will say that this was not an emotionally satisfying read. Whether supernatural or not, there is a very real terror that permeates this story: the theme of children helpless and voiceless in the face of abuse from their caretakers. For a new parent especially, it's deeply upsetting, and it is delivered without any final catharsis. I was left with just a sense of hopelessness and loss at the end, and I was happy to have my son in my arms to hold. show less

Authors who can make long sentences flow will always get five stars from me. Henry James unfurls a sentence, line after line, and my eyes race over the words, each a brushstroke painting a picture in my mind’s eye.

So I have, until now, avoided Turn of the Screw. It was always billed as a ghost story and ghost stories hold no interest for me. I’ve been on a short story kick lately and hoped this particular story would be a good diversion during a particularly trying week at work. Couldn’t have made a better choice for an easy but absorbing read.

James cleverly set this up to appear as a ghost story. The tale begins with a group of people sitting around a fire telling ghost stories. When you think about it, the horror genre in show more books and movies are written to induce a very specific reaction in the audience. Clearly there is an intended audience - they are written right into the book! Moreover it is an audience who approach the story with a certain expectation - they want to be scared...horrified. The author's job is to make it so!

There is horror here and fright, but it is never grossly presented. James weaves so much ambiguity into the evil aspects of the tale that the reader’s imagination must do the work. We each are left to harbor our own horrors and imagine the “general uncanny ugliness.”

I only wish James had brought us back to the hearth at the end of the tale so that we could hear what everyone around the fire thought of the telling. show less

I was told that The Turn of the Screw is great for learning how to write suspense and keep readers hooked. So when I picked up James’s novella, I didn’t do it casually. I approached it like a writer dissecting craft, paying close attention to every turn of phrase, every pause, every shadow that James cast across the page.

It means I probably read the story differently than I would have if I’d been reading purely for pleasure. Instead of racing ahead to find out what happened next, I paid attention to the machinery beneath the prose. What I discovered was a masterclass in tension, ambiguity, psychology, and how a story can subtly haunt the reader.

A Story Within a Story (Within a Story)
Right from the opening, James makes sure we’re show more unsettled. The novella doesn’t begin with the governess and her haunted house; but with a man named Douglas, reading from a manuscript written by the governess herself, who, we’re told, is already dead.

So whose story are we really reading? The governess’s? Douglas’s? Our own, as we become complicit in resurrecting her voice? From the start, the very structure of the book feels haunted. Even before we meet a single ghost, we’re reminded that the act of storytelling itself can summon the dead.

The Freudian Ghosts
Critics have spent more than a century arguing about what the ghosts mean. Are they real? Are they hallucinations? Are they the product of the governess’s sexual repression?

Here’s where Freud wanders in—though James wrote The Turn of the Screw before Freud’s theories became mainstream, later readings of the novella seemed to confirm Freud’s ideas about repression and the unconscious.

Take the governess’s first encounter with Peter Quint. She’s walking in the garden, lost in thoughts of her employer (the man she secretly loves but can never have). When she spots a figure, her first thought is that it’s him. But it isn’t. It’s Quint, a servant. A ghost.

Why the terror? A Freudian reading would say Quint appears as the physical manifestation of her forbidden desire. A twisted “stand-in” for the man she craves but can’t have. And the horror deepens when you consider Quint’s rumored relationship with the young Miles. Suddenly the boundaries between love, desire, morality, and corruption blur. What she fears most may not be the ghost at all, but herself.

Read more at https://www.summonfantasy.com/reviews/why-the-turn-of-the-screw-still-messes-wit.... show less

When our daughter was a toddler, one of the other toddlers she regularly exchanged germs with at toddler social events was a boy named James, and James' dad's name was Henry. We would often run into the two of them, little snotnosed James sitting upon Henry's shoulders, and I got into the habit of referring to them as a single entity, "Henry James". Look, I'd say to my daughter — there goes Henry James! Or, you'll never guess who we saw at the playground today, I'd say to my wife — our friend Henry James!

Of course, the real Henry James is no laughing matter. Reading him is like floundering in a slow-motion Sargasso Sea of language, the main clause an elusive seahorse, forever just out of reach. It's a maddening, but strangely show more addictive experience, playing Henry James bingo with his wild verbs of saying — adjure, pursue, asseverate — his junctures and obtrusions, his obsessive use of the feminine suffix — conductress, protectress, instructress, interlocutress. Even his shorter sentences can be maximally disorienting:

I had left her meanwhile in little doubt of my small hope of representing with success even to her actual sympathy my sense of the real splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got him into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge.

It doesn't always work for me. I read The Wings of the Dove mostly while using the treadmill in a hotel in Bogotá, and the mental torture of that almost eclipsed the pain in my lungs and legs. But here, and in my favourite James, the spooky short The Jolly Corner, the murky sea of the prose replicates the psychological ambiguities of the story, and sometimes you just have to laugh out loud, as when he describes the expression on someone's face by telling us that "she had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions".

For further Jamesian comedy I refer you to Edith Wharton's experience of wayfinding with him. show less