Guilt and Ambiguity in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw
This paper examines the question of moral responsibility in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, arguing that the novella's power lies in its refusal to assign blame clearly. The analysis explores the Governess as an unreliable narrator whose romanticized, sexually charged language toward the children she supervises raises disturbing questions about her character. The paper also considers the two apparitions — Peter Quint and Miss Jessel — as possible sources of corruption. Drawing comparisons to Hamlet and Nabokov's Lolita, the essay ultimately concludes that James constructs a deliberate moral ambiguity in which every character is a suspect, leaving both the characters and the reader without the clarity they seek.
- Introduction: Something Rotten in the House of Bly: Framing question: who is responsible for the novella's evil?
- The Governess as an Unreliable Narrator: Governess's romanticized, unsettling descriptions of the children
- Sexual Undercurrents and the Language of Possession: Latent sexual imagery in the Governess's interactions with Miles
- The Ship Without a Compass: Ambiguity and Reader Disorientation: James's deliberate withholding of clarity from characters and readers
- The Governess's Mission to Save the Children: Governess's obsessive drive to rescue Miles and expose Quint
- The Ghosts as Forces of Evil: Evidence that Quint and Miss Jessel are genuine sources of corruption
- Conclusion: Everyone Is a Suspect: Unresolved blame makes the novella a lasting moral puzzle
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper uses close reading effectively, anchoring interpretive claims in specific textual quotations and then unpacking the language in detail — for example, analyzing the honeymoon simile and the phrase "possessing him" to expose latent sexual tension.
- The comparative framework — drawing on Hamlet and Lolita — provides a literary context that sharpens the argument without overshadowing the primary text.
- The paper sustains a central organizing question ("who is to blame?") throughout, using it to structure each section and return to in the conclusion, giving the essay coherence despite its deliberately open-ended subject matter.
Key academic technique demonstrated
This paper demonstrates how to perform reader-response and psychoanalytic close reading simultaneously. By treating the Governess's language as both a narrative device and a symptom of psychological disturbance, the writer shows how a single passage can be read on multiple levels — literally, symbolically, and psychosexually — without forcing a single definitive interpretation.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens with a comparative hook (Shakespeare's Hamlet), states its central question, then works through three layers of suspicion: the Governess's unsettling characterizations of the children, James's deliberate narrative withholding, and finally the possibility that the ghosts are genuinely culpable. The conclusion returns to the Hamlet comparison to highlight what makes James's novella distinctively unresolvable.
Introduction: Something Rotten in the House of Bly
In speaking of ghost stories, one may say that while there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, there is something truly rotten in the House of Bly. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is filled with moral depravity and psychological terror, so much so that it gives even the greatest ghost story a run for its money. What makes the novella such a tour de force is not the fact that, like Shakespeare's rendering of Denmark in Hamlet, the House of Bly is "an unweeded garden" of "things rank and gross in nature," but that unlike Hamlet the source of that moral depravity and psychological terror is a complete mystery (Shakespeare). The purpose of this essay is to examine who is to blame for all the misery and terror in The Turn of the Screw.
The Governess as an Unreliable Narrator
From the start, the reader senses that something is wrong with the Governess — but what, exactly? She begins seeing dead people, yet there is more to it than that. There is something, for lack of a better word, off about her, and the reader asks this question throughout the book.
Signs of her strangeness appear early on. When she meets young Flora for the first time, she tells the reader: "But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with my restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect" (James). The narrator is so infatuated with her young charge that she cannot sleep. While it is polite to speak kindly of children in one's care, it is rather unusual to describe them in such romanticized terms. Moreover, it is unsettling that she loses sleep over the young girl's "angelic beauty."
This description — and there are many more throughout the novel involving both Flora and Miles — recalls Humbert Humbert's fiery characterizations of his nymphet in Nabokov's Lolita. One cannot easily forget the impression Lolita leaves on him: "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul" (Nabokov). One wonders whether the Governess shares some of Humbert's faults — namely, his pedophilic predilections. While there is no hard evidence to implicate her as a child molester, her words are telling.
Sexual Undercurrents and the Language of Possession
Consider this passage describing one of her last meetings with Miles:
"While this was done Miles stood again with his hands in his little pockets and his back to me — stood and looked out of the wide window through which, that other day, I had seen what pulled me up. We continued silent while the maid was with us — as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some young couple who, on their wedding journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter. He turned round only when the waiter had left us. 'Well — so we're alone!'" (James).
Of all the ways to describe one of her final meetings with Miles, the Governess chooses to invoke the dynamics of a newly wedded couple on their honeymoon, bristling with sexual desire. The sexual tension between the two is so strong that when a waiter notices them, they become bashful. While nothing in the passage is explicit, it is a fair reading of the text — particularly given Miles's concluding exclamation, "Well — so we're alone!" This clichéd phrase strongly implies a sexual undercurrent between the Governess and her charge.
Conclusion: Everyone Is a Suspect
In the end, what one has is a story with evil at every turn but no one to pin it on — no one to blame for it. In Hamlet it is clear who the villain is: the dead king's brother. In The Turn of the Screw, everyone is a suspect. As a result, the story is a mindbender — not only for the characters, but for readers as well. Everyone wants answers; in James's world, however, he gives only more questions.
Works Cited
James, Henry, and Robert Kimbrough. The Turn of the Screw: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Essays in Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 1966. Print.
Lane, Anthony. "Fright Nights." The New Yorker. 19 Feb. 2012. Web.
Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Lolita. New York: Knopf, 1992. Print.
Shakespeare, William, André Gide, and Jacques Schiffrin. Hamlet. New York: Pantheon, 1945. Print.
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