Autumn 2020 - "The Turn of the Screw"
- not f. scott
- Oct 15, 2020
- 22 min read
Updated: Dec 3, 2020
Observing the Observer
****SPOILERS AHEAD!****
(You’ve been warned…)
To preface:
I am not an expert on gothic horror. I am simply someone who took a lot of lit courses in college and grad school, then picked up a random and delayed interest in Victorian-era horror. My own points of reference/context for this genre as of now are limited to:
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818)
Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820)
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)
...and a smattering of Poe and Dickens (works published around the 1840s).
I have read Ann Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest (1791), but as I can recall practically none of it today, I am going to consider myself an amateur to Radcliffe’s works as well – she played far too significant a role in shaping the genre for my very flimsy recollection of her first success to be reliable knowledge in any way.
To put this all into perspective, Henry James published The Turn of the Screw in 1898, so the influences of those earliest gothic horror writers like Shelley and Radcliffe are important.
For some additional context, The Turn of the Screw was published toward the end of James’ “middle years” following a bit of a failed attempt at playwriting. His active writing and publishing career spans from about 1864 to 1915, with his first major novel, Watch and Ward, getting published in installments in The Atlantic in 1871, and his two final novels The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past in development until his health deteriorated in 1915 (to be published unfinished, posthumously in 1917). Henry James was born in 1843 and died in 1916 at the age of 73.
With all of that said, here are some of the points I found most striking upon my first read-through. I would love to hear anyone else’s thoughts – the text is actually free online (best thing about reading old literature!) so let me know if you’re out there fellow literary nerds!
Note #1: The Structure
There tends to be a lot of layering in gothic novels – epistolary structure dominates much of the genre, leading the reader down a sometimes convoluted, Inception-esque plot trail that often goes several layers deep. Take Bram Stoker’s Dracula, for example: we begin the narrative in someone’s journal, which then leads into another person’s journal, which then opens up some long letters, along with other “primary resource” materials like newspaper articles and telegrams so we end up getting caught at times in a story within a story within a story (within a story). This is also very much the case in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer.
While The Turn of the Screw is no exception to this epistolary structural trend, it also doesn’t follow it quite as convolutedly as its predecessors either. We begin the narrative with a nameless character who is seemingly unimportant to the plot aside from receiving it. She or he appears to be at some sort of holiday retreat and is present when someone named Douglas claims he has a ghost story that will outdo everyone else’s. To make matters even more suspenseful, the party must wait several days for this story. Douglas is not going to recite it from memory, but rather, has sent someone to retrieve it in hard copy from a locked drawer in his apartment. You see, he has the encounter recorded in writing directly from the woman who experienced it first-hand, a woman he met several decades ago, who has passed since. What’s even more peculiar – Douglas himself has never read this woman’s written document of the encounter. He has only ever heard the story once, told to him directly by the woman herself nearly forty years ago.
The remainder of The Turn of the Screw exists within this woman’s document. There are no further descriptions of Douglas or his crew – we, the reader, never return to them at all. What’s interesting, I suppose, is the surprising simplicity in this structural design. It is almost as if James intended for the reader to anticipate the typical narrative-within-narratives gothic progression when this is in fact the only switch-up we have in the novella. The author of this document, a woman who also remains nameless throughout, never, in fact, directly divulges any letters or telegrams or journal entries she discovers. Though various letters act heavily in shaping the story’s plot, most forms of communication are strikingly absent within her narrative. Unlike most gothic fiction, we don't get to read along with this narrator. We are only privy to her interpretation of any letter’s contents, and many times, any direct dialogue exchanged. This lack of information for the reader to interpret on their own plays a significant role in the narrator’s plausibility throughout.
The labyrinthine nature of the gothic genre beyond this narrative switch is perhaps more indicative in the sentences themselves. Take this line for example:
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 splendour of the little inspiration with which, after I had got him into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge.
Rife with prepositional phrases, the sentence is easy to get lost in – a syntactical effort that seems to further hint at the typical gothic convolution of plot source. This micro-level means of disorientation seems just as much a token of the gothic horror genre; as if every bit of the writing itself is meant to mirror the ways in which the protagonists, too, will lose themselves within the maze of the fiction’s Horror. We, the reader, experience the protagonists’ descent alongside them this way. Particularly so in The Turn of the Screw when the lens through which we see the entirety of the happenings in Bly Manor is tunneled by the rigid – and often wildly presumptuous – conclusions of the governess alone.
Note #2: The Power Struggle of a Single Woman in Victorian Society
When written by a man, any depiction of a woman’s struggle within a patriarchy should always be taken with a solid grain of salt. However, James does hit on some interesting notes with the governess’ perspective of her experience, ones that more viscerally succeed in imagining a single woman’s navigation through Victorian patriarchy without resorting to the usual gothic scheme of killing the unmarried woman off altogether.
Some important context here, perhaps – Henry James never married in his lifetime, nor did he take any sort of interest in finding a wife. He is actually presumed by many scholars to have been interested in men. Though this does not necessarily pare down to the same experience a single woman might feel within the rigid heteronormative expectations of Victorian society, if James were, in fact, a gay man in a time when gay men (and homosexuality in general) were particularly vilified, this could explain why he might relate to the perspective of someone like the governess in The Turn of the Screw who seems to crave a sense of agency in authority that she is not necessarily granted by the novella’s end.
While we don’t learn much about the governess’ personal life, we are clued in to some scraps of her background – namely, that she is single, in her twenties, “privately bred” (in her own words), and the youngest daughter of a parson. She falls into her position at Bly Manor by answering an ad posted by the peculiar master of the house – the children's uncle – to whom she becomes unwittingly devoted, longing passionately to impress him throughout the remainder of the novella, even in spite of his bizarre insistence that she absolutely never communicate any of the goings on at Bly Manor with him thereafter.
This completely hands-off regard toward his own property and lineage appears to work in the governess’ favor, however. As far as the inhabitants of Bly Manor are concerned, she is the local head of authority, in command of overseeing the lives of both her charges – the two children, Miles and Flora – and Bly’s somewhat extensive staff of maids and yard-workers, including Mrs. Grose, the longtime housekeeper who quickly becomes the governess’ most cherished confidante.
This unconventional position of superiority over the others does not go unnoticed by the governess either. Upon her arrival, she freely marvels at how she is “captain of the helm” at Bly Manor, taking pride in the “extraordinary flight of heroism” she believes is expected of her in educating and guiding the children of the house on her own and as she alone sees fit. She is keenly aware of her intellectual prowess over the others at first, particularly over Mrs. Grose, whose actions are frequently described by the governess as those of “simple folk.” She even goes out of her way at times to dwell on Mrs. Grose’s lack of vocabulary and literacy skills:
“To contaminate?” - my big word left her at a loss.
I explained it. “To corrupt.”
“Do you mean you’ll write-?” Remembering she couldn’t, I caught myself up. “How do you communicate?”
“I tell the bailiff. He writes.”
“And should you like him to write our story?”
My question had a sarcastic force that I had not fully intended, and it made her after a moment inconsequently break down. The tears were again in her eyes. “Ah Miss, you write!”
The key word, in this second interaction, is fully. The governess doesn’t fully intend to point out Mrs. Grose’s weaknesses in the shadow of her own strengths, but this very intention is still actively present. It is almost as if in realizing that this unlikely position of power is her own, she is determined to prove to herself over and over again that it still is; as if in finding and securing her footing within this power she feels she must constantly define the lines that distinguish her as superior to those around her. Of course, in doing so with such scrutinizing reflection, the governess only begins uncovering challengers, in her own interpretation. After all, it is during a moment in which she is reflecting on how very much she would like to be seen for the work she is achieving at Bly Manor that she first encounters one of the supernatural entities who comes to derail her efforts.
The ghosts, then, act as a collective foe to the governess’ increasing possessiveness over Bly Manor, not to mention, her increasing possessiveness over the children themselves. The cracks in her certainty of her authority emerge most visibly in her obsessive attempts to control them, as well as who they may appear visible to aside from herself – both ghosts and children alike. As she determinedly fixes her attention on monitoring where, when, and to whom the ghosts choose to show up, she ends up creating more of an issue for herself than there ever seems to have been in the first place, depending on whether one interprets her account of the ghosts as a reality or a symptom of a psychological breakdown.
It is worth noting that when held alongside the real-time floundering of an unmarried woman in Victorian society, the governess’ experience floundering against the supernatural forces within Bly Manor seems highly metaphoric. When viewed in this sense, it is the uncontrollable, in both scenarios, that exists as an evil in and of itself, leaving little meddling room for either the governess or an unmarried woman to gain any sort of upper hand. In the governess' case, she seems to deal with her disadvantage by becoming wholly invested in proving how "evil" the evil truly is, a distinction that even protects her, self-consciously perhaps, against any outward association between the ghosts and herself. This is particularly important in the case of Miss Jessel, the female ghost, who not only held the position of governess before the narrator, but whose visible anguish throughout is directly paralleled later on as the current governess laments her own loosening influence over the children's lives.
Unfortunately for the governess, this desperate need to control what she can’t trickles down her every action within Bly and pools stagnantly around the children and how she has come to "lose" them to the supernatural forces. She even begins to conclude that perhaps she never "had" the children in the first place, though this never seems to distemper her excessive attempts to "save" them. Her struggle for power within the household thus increasingly devolves into a state in which her ease of mind rests solely in whether or not the children will confide their every thought to her, as opposed to her ghostly foes, and whether they will keep absolutely nothing from her, as well. Such behavior is quite reflective of the classic "psychotic mother" horror stereotype, highlighting a very real trend of powerless women clinging to the only power they seem to have: motherhood.
Note #3: Cherubic Children and Glorified Motherhood
There is something distinctly disturbing in the way the governess worships the children in the earlier moments in the novella – that is, before she has decided that the children have become “lost” to her and begins to view them far less like angels and far more like something demonic.
To illustrate the extent of the governess' worship, here is a fairly thorough list of her descriptions of the children before she condemns them. It seems important to note that largely all of these observations are made before the governess records a single line of direct dialogue from either Flora or Miles, as well.
I had seen him on the instant, without and within...the same positive fragrance of purity in which I had from the first moment seen his little sister. He was incredibly beautiful…everything but a sort of passion of tenderness for him was swept away by his presence.
What I then and there took him to my heart for was something divine that I have never found to the same degree in any child - his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love.
My conclusion bloomed there with the real rose-flush of his innocence: he was only too fine and fair for the little horrid unclean school-world, and he had paid a price for it.
They were like those cherubs of the anecdote who had - morally at any rate - nothing to whack!
We expect of a small child scant enough “antecedents,” but there was in this beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive, yet extraordinarily happy, that, more than in any creature of his age I have seen, struck me as beginning anew each day.
He has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful lovable goodness.
What surpassed everything was that there was a little boy in the world who could have for the inferior age, sex and intelligence so fine a consideration. {The children} were extraordinarily at one, and to say that they never quarrelled or complained is to make the note of praise coarse for their quality of sweetness.
I remember closing my eyes an instant, yielding, consciously, as before the excess of something beautiful that shone out of the blue of her own.
As can be deduced from this inventory of praise, the governess centers her adoration most prominently around Miles. Though it is impossible to tell whether this favoritism is a result of the governess' own motivations or certain prejudices for either sex James himself held, the distinct difference in the governess' perception of each child is subtle, yet striking, particularly when her lofty opinion of them takes a turn. It is then that her descriptions focus far more heavily on Flora, rather than Miles, often criticizing how Flora has become "ugly" and "old" in her perceived manipulations whereas Miles is noted as being "intelligent" or cunning for manipulating the governess in much the same way.
“She’s not alone, and at such times she’s not a child: she’s an old, old woman.”
“...her incomparable childish beauty had suddenly failed, had quite vanished. I’ve said it already – she was literally, she was hideously hard; she had turned common and almost ugly."
This greater criticism of Flora is perhaps most evident when the governess sends Flora away altogether for refusing to admit that she was convening with the ghost of Miss Jessel and "denying" that she sees the ghost at all. The governess' reasoning afterward – that Bly Manor "has ceased to agree" with Flora – seems a strange sort of remedy to the situation, especially when she simultaneously claims that Miles can still be "saved" despite his own denials of seeing or convening with the ghosts up until this point. Rather, the governess is adamant that Miles' cleverness in "manipulating" her is evidence of his lingering purity – "What had his intelligence been given him for but to save him?" – and comes to believe that she can get a confession out of Miles in his sister's absence, which will ultimately allow her to "win" back his soul from the influence of the ghosts.
It could be said that this disjointed treatment of the children boils down to the governess' sensitivity in rejection. After all, Flora's response to the governess wildly accusing her of meeting Miss Jessel's apparition at the pond is definitively damning in terms of their relationship – "I don't know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never have. I think you're cruel. I don't like you...oh take me away from her!"
Whereas Miles has offered similar denials of the supernatural, his aversion to the governess herself has never been so blatant, and this aversion, it seems, sticks with the governess like a trauma. Not only does she break down wailing for hours after Mrs. Grose takes Flora away, but she dwells on the fact that "...it was not against the possible re-entrance of Miss Jessel on the scene that she protested – it was conspicuously and passionately against mine..." That evening, as if in comparison, she notes that Miles, at least, "wanted...to be with me."
The tone of this lament echoes a pattern of glorified motherhood that is projected in the governess' reflections throughout the novella. Here are just two examples:
I was in receipt in these days of disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well. But with this joy of my children what things in the world mattered?
...I was there to protect and defend the little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most lovable, the appeal of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep constant ache of one’s own engaged affection. We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I – well, I had them.
It is as if the children exist to her as both a purpose and a possession. She desperately desires to claim all of them, thoughts included, and though their unwillingness to confide in her comes as a loss to her because of this, it is nowhere near the sort of loss that an outright rejection of her is. In doing just this at the pond, Flora has actively removed herself as both purpose and possession from the governess, leaving the governess with, perhaps, the only conclusion she can reason – “of course I’ve lost you: I’ve interfered, and you’ve seen, under her dictation...the easy and perfect way to meet it. I’ve done my best, but I’ve lost you. Good-bye.”
Whether Miss Jessel's ghost is imagined by the governess or not, the "psychotic mother" horror stereotype is most palpable in the governess' attitude toward her specifically. She cannot accept that Flora has simply chosen for herself to squirm away from her own possessiveness. Rather, she is more compelled to believe it is her rival, the lingering influence of the previous governess – the most recent mother figure to Flora – who has gotten in the way of their bond.
Gendered expectations and associations such as this one – in which the governess holds Miss Jessel's influence against her own maternal successes – are perhaps what most greatly define the difference in her approach toward Miles and Flora. As she has noted (quoted above), she already views Flora as the "inferior sex," which, typical Victorian sexism aside, also suggests that she understands that Miles, as a male, has a growing claim to more authority over Bly Manor than she herself does. Should Miles one day take up this authority, as he nearly does in the churchyard and in ordering the governess to his bedside as she spies outside his bedroom, the governess will likely be compelled to obey. Thus, when Miles begins to outperform the governess in lessons so quickly over the summer, the threat of this change of power happening much sooner than anticipated seems evident. Sure enough, by the end of the novella, the governess resigns to allowing Miles the greater freedom he demands of her. She quite clearly sees this coming earlier on, too:
Miles’s whole title to independence, the rights of his sex and situation, were so stamped upon him that if he had suddenly struck for freedom I should have had nothing to say.
And she certainly doesn't.
Perhaps it is then a confusion of authority that provokes the governess to imagine herself with Miles in situations as odd as this one:
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.
Despite the "whimsical" nature of this thought, with Miles at a mere ten years old, and, not to mention, her student, the parallel reads highly inappropriate. There are other interactions prior to this line that further contribute to the disturbing romantic tension here – namely, a lot of blushing from the two of them as they probe each other for information late at night, something the governess neither does nor notices nearly as much when conversing with Flora during the day. While her relationship with Flora then shapes itself most steadfastly as that of a mother and child, the governess' relationship with Miles seems to be jumbled into at least three divisions – that of mother and child, that of servant and master, and that of single woman and single man.
This final perverse notion, though dealt with furtively, is perhaps – I would hope, at least – more indication of the governess' options as a single woman in charge of a household in a strict patriarchy. To hold onto her power while still acting within the limits of her society, she must eventually either be mother, or wife, or both, but without (and within) either role, her power is always weaker to that of a man, something she is at least acutely aware of in her want so badly to be seen by one.
Note #4: Unrequited Observing
Unrequited observing plays a special role in The Turn of the Screw. We see several instances of it, beginning most noticeably when the governess “meets” Miles for the first time by watching him from afar:
I was a little late on the scene of his arrival, and I felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for me before the door of the inn at which the coach had put him down, that I had seen him on the instant, without and within, in the great glow of freshness, the same positive fragrance of purity, in which I had from the first moment seen his little sister.
Presented so literally, the act of “seeing” the children, and from this claiming insight to their character both "without and within," leaves much to conjecture. The very fact that the governess supposes she has “seen” Miles "within" at all from this brief, one-sided initial observation gives us some context for the fallacy in her own conclusions throughout the novella. Too often, it seems, the governess readily assumes where there is very little to assume from. And how can we believe what she is saying when monumental realizations are based on observations as brief and shallow as this first “introduction”?
Larger, more impactful assumptions follow quickly. The biggest ones, perhaps, revolve primarily around the ghosts and the children's involvement with them. It is only a look from Flora at the pond that convinces the governess the child is secretly scheming with the ghost of Miss Jessel, and later, it is an observation of Miles staring at a window in the lawn that convinces her he has been scheming with the likes of Peter Quint. Miles’ own explanation of the incident – that he crept out to the lawn at night so the governess would know he could be “bad” – holds little in sync with the governess’ own conclusions. Of course, she does not believe his account anyway, favoring her own conclusion that the two children are simply manipulating her in order to prevent her from interfering with their supernatural friends.
It is worth noting that the children never bring up the presence or identities of the ghosts themselves until after the governess has confronted Flora with Miss Jessel's name directly. One could therefore theorize that while the governess claims the children are constantly looking for the ghosts, perhaps they are truly only trying to discover what the governess herself is habitually searching for; that Miles’ presumed death in not finding Peter Quint at the end was actually induced by a fear in the governess’ wild gestures that someone was there who Miles couldn’t see. We never get any instance in which Miles or Flora bring up Miss Jessel or Peter Quint without the governess prodding them to (in some way, at least) first, which makes it entirely uncertain whether the ghosts were in any way real to the children, or whether they were just a part of some terrifying horror story their governess was fixated on telling them.
But while the level of honesty from all the characters remains unclear throughout, it is entirely certain that, they all do want to be seen, and not necessarily from anyone they themselves are looking back at. After all, Miles’ means of provoking the governess to witness him “being bad” in the lawn, was a collaborative effort to achieve only just that:
“...But how could you be sure I should know it?”
“Oh I arranged that with Flora.” His answers rang out with a readiness! “She was to get up and look out.”
“Which is what she did do.” It was I who fell into the trap!
“So she disturbed you, and, to see what she was looking at, you also looked - you saw.”
In this context, the ghosts could become an alluring entity to be “seen” by, regardless of how real they are to the character. Perhaps this is how the governess first comes to imagine them – or encounter them, depending on the interpretation. Either way, her want for recognition effectively comes true when she first catches a glimpse of Peter Quint. Just before the ghostly introduction, the governess muses:
...it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet some one. Some one would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn’t ask more than that – I only asked that he should know; and the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome face.
Of course, in seeing Peter Quint on the balcony directly after, and not the master of the house who she truly desires to impress, the governess later seems to hedge the thought to aim more specifically:
I now saw that I had been asked for a service admirable and difficult; and there would be a greatness in letting it be seen – oh in the right quarter! – that I could succeed where many another girl might have failed.
As somewhat of a third ghost of Bly Manor, the children’s uncle is rarely forgotten by either children or governess. Despite his absence, each one constantly wonders after his opinion of them. The children even write him letters that the governess, perhaps in duty to his “no interruptions” clause, never sends. It is possibly an act of retaliation then, that encourages Miles to later steal and destroy the only letter the governess herself ends up writing for him.
When taken out of context of the supernatural, the desire “to be seen” in both the children and the governess aligns symptomatically with the relationship of a family to an absentee father. In the children, particularly, it is not enough that the governess hovers so closely in her own observations of them – they are too keenly aware of the parent who is not looking, fueling a nearly unquenchable thirst for attention purely in want of the one they don’t have. Whereas the governess interprets this behavior as both a result of and desire for the company of Bly Manor’s ghosts, it could be much more logically concluded that the children yearn more greatly for their uncle’s affections, prompting them to “misbehave” in ways that might get his attention – such as Miles getting himself kicked out of school.
As for the governess, her intentions appear to be similar – in stirring up so much trouble with her assumptions about Flora and Miles’ association with the supernatural, she has effectively given herself enough reason to reach out to the uncle regarding an “emergency” he may be inclined to respond to. The ghosts then, perhaps, pose more like reflections of the characters’ own deepest needs and insecurities – distant in many ways from the master of Bly Manor's world, they only wish to somehow appear visible to him.
Note #5: Confused Time and Ghostly Equals
This fifth and final note ties back to a lack of control that weaves much of the novella together. Just as the convoluted phrasing, chaotic assumptions, and disconnected power hierarchy disorient both reader and protagonist alike, so, too, does the loss of definitive time in moments that seem to matter most. This is perhaps what is most striking about each of the governess’ encounters with Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. She never seems to know how much time passes during or after most of her interactions with them.
I call it time, but how long was it? I can’t speak to purpose to-day of the duration of these things. That kind of measure must have left me: they couldn’t have lasted as they actually appeared to me to last.
We see this sort of disorientation happen to the governess more and more frequently through her stay in Bly Manor, her temporal clarity only really returning to her in the final moments, when she feels, rather erroneously, that she has “won back” Miles from Peter Quint.
I caught him, yes, I held him - it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
What’s perhaps most disconcerting about this final line are the implications that precede it, especially in regards to the governess’ internal (and in a way, repressed) sense of equality with the ghosts, as well as the identity crisis losing her sense of time with them evokes. During a staring match with Peter Quint on the stairwell, she even writes:
The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to make me doubt if even I were in life.
“Moments” and “instants” as opposed to the more concrete “minute” seem to measure the time the governess spends attempting to intimidate the ghosts. But lost as she is in her time spent with them, her urges to rid them from the children’s lives seem to come from some sense of equal-footing between herself and them. This is particularly noticeable in her protests against Miss Jessel, specifically after the governess chooses not to enter the church with Miles, Flora and Mrs. Grose, and instead returns to Bly Manor to find Miss Jessel standing in the school room.
Dark as midnight in her black dress, her haggard beauty and her unutterable woe, she had looked at me long enough to appear to say that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted indeed I had the extraordinary chill of a feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest against it that, actually addressing her – “You terrible miserable woman!” – I heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, rang through the long passage and the empty house.
A psychological reading of the text could take much of the governess’ concern with the ghosts presumed relation with the children as a realized entity of her own concern at her own inadequacies as their influence. In the brief episodes in which she does seem to acknowledge the absurdity of some of her assumptions she appears to conclude similar things:
...there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of {Miles} being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent what then on earth was I?
What then on earth is the governess indeed, when by her own implications, those whose eyes are “unsealed” to the dead are spiritually corrupt, and by the end of the novella, it is only she who still sees them?
Whatever the case, The Turn of the Screw presents a litany of paths of interpretation – in the end, it is ultimately the reader's choice, alongside that fireside audience we never return to, to either believe the governess or condemn her. James himself is reported to have ascertained that in writing the story, at least, the intention was for the ghosts to be real, but the possibility that there is more going on psychologically seems to be one of the greatest debates through which the novella endures. So, if you've made it this far (congratulations, my friend, this is one hell of a thought vomit), I'll pass the question off to you:
Do you believe the governess was truly dealing with something "revoltingly against nature," or is this an instance in which we are witnessing what enacts when one's "turn" within life seems... well, screwed?
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