Other essays and articles in the Literature Archives related to this topic include : Character Analysis of the Narrator in “Turn of the Screw” by Henry James  •  Class and Satire in “The American” by Henry James and “Huck Finn” by Mark Twain  •  Realism in American Literature  •  American Literature in Historical Context : 1865 to Roosevelt

There are still more ominous details, however. The governess’s vision of Peter Quint in the window hints at her paranoia; no one else can see him, and Mrs. Grose reveals that he is a deceased former employee of the estate. Then Miss Jessel, the former governess appears to the narrator; suggesting she feels threatened by the previous people who were caring for her charges. Her life becomes consumed with the desire to protect the children from a threat that does not even exist. Whenever the presence of the ghosts is denied by Mrs. Grose or the children, the governess becomes still more insistent about their corporeality and the danger that the phantasms pose to Flora and Miles.

The psychological fragility displayed by the governess is remarkable because it seems largely of her own making. In other words, the governess does not seem to have any sort of organic mental disorder; rather, she simply seems unable to cope with life on any other terms than her own. From the outset, the governess displays an extreme fear of the unknown; she lacks the emotional maturity to cope with the experience of ambiguity, which is, of course, a feature of human life. As a reaction, the governess is forced to develop a set of maladaptive psychological defenses in “Turn of the Screw” by Henry James, which is characterized by her efforts to control as many aspects of her life—and of the lives of those around her—to the greatest extent possible. It is no accident that the author cast the governess in a position in which she would be in charge of young people’s lives. Flora and Miles, as children lacking their own agency, authority, and decision-making capacity, are able to be directed by the governess who, while well-meaning, transfers her own anxiety onto them.

This anxiety becomes completely untenable for all of the characters. The governess decompensates mentally, becoming less and less capable of discerning fantasy from reality. Her paranoid ideations increase, her reality testing is impaired, and her judgment is compromised. Miles, for his part, is so overwhelmed that he dies. Because of the ambiguous ending, the reader does not learn what happens to Flora, nor to the governess herself. The ambiguity, however, is not a failure on James’s part to find an adequate resolution to his ghost story. The master stroke here, of course, is that James transfers anxiety and horror of the unknown yet again through this ambiguous conclusion, this time from the characters onto the reader. James confronts the reader to consider how he or she feels about the unknown, but refrains from telling the reader how to feel, much less manage, ambiguity and its attendant existential horrors, which involve fear of our loss of control, fear of our fate, and fear of how others’ feelings about us will change over time. While few readers will handle ambiguity as poorly as the governess, most people do have difficulties coping with uncertainty.

Still, why does James undo the ghost story as he writes it, seeming to make the story less about ghosts and more about one woman’s mental illness? An understanding of James’s biographical information suggests that the author was fascinated by the emerging discipline of psychology, and as he immersed himself in the developments in this field, he became more conscious of developing characters and situations that exposed psychological fragility and faltering human attempts to manage our own fears. In a letter to a fellow writer who had sent him a crime story manuscript, James responded by meditating on the “hideous sincerity of fear” (328) that is so often repressed in literature, as in life, and praised the writer for his efforts to expose and explore such fear. To another correspondent, James wrote what he may have wanted to convey to the reader in The Turn of the Screw, “Sit loose and live in the day — don’t borrow trouble, and remember that nothing happens as we forecast it” (124).

Ultimately, The Turn of the Screw is much more than a good old-fashioned ghost story, though it is that, too. This late novella by Henry James is a finely wrought portrait of psychological anxiety, of the type that we create for ourselves. Rather than accepting her new situation for all of the joy and the challenges that it could offer, for life is indeed composed of both, the governess could only cope with one emotion at a time. She could not, as James wrote, sit loose and live in the day. Instead, she destroyed her own joy by obsessing over phantasms that neither existed nor were worth the energy. The ghost story, then, becomes a convenient metaphor for psychological distress and our own lack of consciousness. By leaving the conclusion ambiguous, James leaves us, as readers, with the challenging task of learning how to manage our own psychological difficulties, as he himself seemingly did through his writing.

Works Cited

Bloom, Harold, Ed. Modern Critical Interpretations: Henry James’s Daisy Miller, the

Turn of the Screw, and Other Tales. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.

Clayton, John J. Gestures of Healing: Anxiety and the Modern Novel. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991.

Cox, Michael, Ed. Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1999.

James, Henry. The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw. Anthony Curtis, Ed. New York: Penguin, 1984.

James, Henry. The Letters of Henry James. Percy Lubbock, Ed. New York: Scribner, 1920.