Screw by Henry James, Due

¶ … Screw by Henry James, due to its ambiguity and obscurity, is considerably one of literature's earliest focal points of New Criticism. This revered "Ghost Story" raised much a stink throughout the early part of last century (Publication date: 1898). Moral issues gained the high rank as the run-of-the-mill disturbance at the top of most common critic's points of reference. Actually, it was either adored or abhorred -- but more the latter.

Even so, can we tell which way to comprehend these critical analyses? In so many cases, they are just as vague as the story they accrediting for such ambiguity.

Anyhow, so we'll focus on the abhorred here, anyway. Morally deplorable, ethically reprehensible, socially repugnant, etc. typically constitute the critical regards. Or is it? The setting as well as characterizations, figurative, and allegorical components (i.e., group of guests construing ghost stories on Christmas Eve).

This short novel, or novella, was discounted as a dark, eery, spooky tale, until Edmund Wilson accredited this story as a psychological case study in his renowned essay as told in third-person by the author, Henry James. He reflects here the psychological instability as interpreted of a young woman, a woman inspired by delusion, nothing more, and this is evident even to her.

Furthermore, Wilson reflects solely of Freudian ideology, as he brings to light that "the governess who is made to tell the story is a neurotic case of sex repression, and that the ghosts are not real ghosts but hallucinations of the governess"

Concerning the resonance of New Criticism first, though, surely accused of being blinded to (as according to Terry Eagleton) "ignoring the larger social, political, and economic realities of the society in which the literary work was produced and the work's political implications for the critic's own historical milieu," or as being an unfinished or fragmented understanding, these critics contend that the read remains confronted with the choice of whether to side with the unidentified governess, who has been introduced as shady from initiation, is suffering a lapse of neurosis and maintains a peculiar fascination, or even a puzzlingly aroused imagination, or else this ghost story be a valid event concerning ghosts. This piece has been in literary debate since its publication.

Moreover, the New York Times Saturday "Review of Books and Art" (15 October 1891, 111, 681-82) regarded this piece as "a deliberate, powerful, and horribly successful study of the magic of evil, of the subtle influence over human hearts and minds of the sin with which this world is accursed." Also, this article accredited the piece along the lines of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson.

With that, definition of this piece has not yet been completed. The New York Times continued with "the strongest and most affecting argument against sin we have lately encountered in literature." At that, through a process of self-annihilation, this journalist went on to "express the awful, almost overpowering sense of the evil that human nature is subject to derive from it [the story] by the sensitive reader." He judged the story as "one of the most moving and...most remarkable works of fiction published in many years."

Timing; it was all about timing. Ahhh, but there is more...

The Detroit Free Press termed the work a "horribly successful study of depravity, equal in stature to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." On that exact day, as recorded in the New York Tribune on October 23, 1898, (p. 14), this novella "crystallizes an original and fascinating idea in absolutely appropriate form."

Further, both the Overland Monthly (November, 1898, p 493) and the Springfield Republican praised the story's authorship (October 1898, p 8) for it being "unique among storytellers" for his knack of "riveting...the reader's attention on every sentence."

To accompany this ambiguity between praise or dismay, more reviews appeared in the St. Paul Daily Pioneer Press (November 1898, p 36), Life (November 1898, p 368), the Portland Morning Oregonian (November 1898, p. 22), the Critic (December 1898, p 524), and Ainslee's Magazine (December, 1898, p 518). The American Monthly Review of Reviews (December, 1898, p 732-733), all which regarded this novella as "the finest work ... [James] has ever done -- for the foul breath of the bottomless pit itself."