Published in 1898, this is by Henry James (1843-1916), who re-emerged in my reading world in 2023, with The Aspern Papers (1888), and The Europeans (1878), only to be elbowed aside again.

I listened to the excellent audio-version, in which Richard Armitage narrates the framing story that opens the book, and Emma Thompson gives us the governess's first-person account. It must be difficult to narrate, with its long, complex sentences. But Thompson carries you through with verve, and also manages to make the children sound really creepy...



OK, so I've already said there's a governess (she's never named), and there are children (they're Miles and Flora, ten and eight years old, respectively). It's the children that give us the "turn of the screw", as we're informed by Douglas, the "mediator" of the narrative (it's to him, and to him only, that the governess passed on the story that he is now proposing to read to the little group gathered one December around the fire in an appropriately old house). Someone else from the group (we're told by an I-narrator) has recounted a story about a ghostly visitation to a child. Douglas says he can top that: "If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children --?" The group is intrigued; they want to hear the ghost story with the two children in it.

Because he has to send for the manuscript (written "in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand"), Douglas uses the waiting time to tantalize us with a bit more information. The governess was 10 years older than him when she told him her story. (She left him the manuscript when she died 20 years ago, and Douglas, we're told, bequeathes it to the narrator -- so it's clear that the whole adventure is set quite a way back in the past.) Douglas obviously admired this woman. She had been in love, he tells us, but he won't disclose with whom. Our narrator suggests that the story will reveal that detail. But Douglas replies: "The story WON'T tell... not in any literal, vulgar way."

The narrator sketches what we need to know to understand the governess's tale, which starts at the beginning of her employment. She (the daughter of a poor country parson) has been engaged by "a bachelor in the prime of life", who's also a traveller and a bit of a buccaneer, to look after the children that his brother inopportunely gave into his care when he died a couple of years before. "The master", as he's generally termed, has provided a house for the children, and staff, and funds, and educational opportunities (school for the boy, a governess for the girl). But he otherwise wants nothing to do with them. The condition of the governess's employment is that "she should never trouble him -- but never, never". And indeed, after that first interview, when all is explained to her, and a subsequent one, during which she agrees to undertake the job, she never sees her employer again.



After this introduction, the governess's tale begins. Arriving at the big country house of Bly; meeting Mrs Grose, the very capable-sounding housekeeper; meeting Flora, "the most beautiful child I had ever seen"; receiving a letter from Miles's school, saying he was expelled for reasons they don't explain; hearing about her "young and pretty" predecessor, Miss Jessel, who had gone off for a short holiday, and mysteriously died; and then meeting Miles, the effect of whose presence was that "everything but a sort of passion of tenderness for him was swept away" (leaving her more confused than ever about the reasons for his expulsion from school) -- this is all recounted with a hint of mystery, but fairly straightforwardly.

Then the ghosts start to appear... First Peter Quint, a former valet to "the master", who stayed behind at Bly when his employer went to London, but subsequently died in an accident; who was "great friends" with little Miles, as the governess understands from Mrs Grose; and who was "too free with everyone". And then Miss Jessel.

More horrifying than the actual apparitions for the governess is her impression that the children are aware of them, but are not saying anything. This is alarming because it somehow puts them in cahoots with entities she is convinced are there expressly to exercise a baleful influence over them. Mrs Grose agrees that Quint and Jessel were "infamous". They had had a liaison (in spite of the difference in "their rank, their condition"), and the housekeeper has her ideas about Miss Jessel's "real reason for leaving".

They're fairly inactive ghosts, it's true. They look; they sit; they stand. But the governess feels there's much more going on: "The four, depend upon it," she tells Mrs Grose, "perpetually meet."

She tries to bring this all out into the open. But when she attempts to force Flora to admit to her awareness of the ghosts' presence, she succeeds only in frightening her into sickness and a desire for isolation. Mrs Grose, meanwhile, has SEEN nothing during this particular incident, but is subsequently convinced by the way Flora speaks, and the kind of language she uses, that she has been subject to outside influences. The governess suggests Flora and Mrs Grose take themselves off for a change of scene, while she stays behind with Miles.

When she tries the same truth-seeking manoeuvres with him, she's suddenly distracted by the appearance of Quint at the window. But she continues. Miles hints at the reason for his expulsion from school: "I said things... [but] only to... those I liked... They must have repeated them. To those THEY liked... It was too bad... What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home." She asks for clarification, but before it can be given, there's Quint at the window again, "the hideous author of our woe -- the white face of damnation". Miles thinks she's seeing Miss Jessel -- and names her. Not Miss Jessel, says the governess, "But it's at the window -- straight before us. It's THERE -- the coward horror, there for the last time!"

And then Miles comes up with Quint's name. Delighted at his apparent admission that he has indeed been experiencing the presence of the ghost, she points again at the window. But he sees nothing: "With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. 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."

The governess, then, while trying to shield her charges from predatory influences, ends up traumatizing one, and killing the other...



***

The first thing to say about this novella is that it is genuinely very suspenseful and scary. Throughout, there hangs over us a dark heaviness, an awful foreboding, and the ratcheting up of tension is very nicely managed.

But what does it mean? I first listened to The Turn of the Screw in 1993, on my interminable commutes to my job in Somerset, but my diary reminds me that I didn't at all know what to make of it...

And it's certainly true that there are a huge number of oblique conversations, leaving us with disconnected phrases capable of bearing many meanings.

This time, I at least had a few ideas about possible meanings. And others, it seems, have LOTS of ideas. In fact, I soon discovered that the novella has become "the site of a long-standing and seemingly intractable critical controversy".

Is it a ghost story? Or a madness story? Is its thrust, in other words, metaphysical or psychoanalytical?

Shoshana Felman sums up the first interpretation like this: "The governess becomes steadily more convinced that the ghosts have come back to pursue their nefarious intercourse with the children, to take possession of their souls and to corrupt them radically. Her task is thus to save the children from the ghosts, to engage in a ferocious moral struggle against 'evil,' a struggle whose strategy consists of an attempt to catch the children in the very act of communing with the spirits, and thereby to force them to admit that communion, to confess their knowledge of the ghosts and their infernal complicity with them. Total avowal, the governess believes, would exorcise the children..." What these nefarious intentions might be is -- of course -- never expressed in so many words. But the whiff of paedophilia that hangs over the story is probably the resason that early critics described it as "distinctly repulsive" and "hopelessly evil".

Lending his undoubted influence to the second interpretation, the "madness" camp, was Edmund Wilson, whose 1938 essay claimed that what we're dealing with here is "a story about 'a neurotic case of sex repression' in which 'the ghosts are not real ghosts but hallucinations of the governess'". Wilson's work sparked a slew of Freudian interpretations of the story, and more recently, since "straightforward Freudianism has been widely discredited, Lacanian and deconstructionist interpretations have filled the void". This is very much where Siri Hustvedt's interpretation fits: "The story's secret was apparent to me: the governess-narrator is mad and the apparitions she sees are the products of her disordered mind."

Famously (or at least much quotedly) rebutting the Freudian turn is Robert B. Heilman, whose 1947 article argues that Wilson has it all wrong, and James is NOT saying the whole spooky business is all in the governess's mind.



After the thesis and the antithesis, of course, we have the (ultimately much more convincing) synthesis, which is that the whole point of this story is its ambiguity... Brad Leithauser offers a very readable exposition of this both/and approach:

"The reader," he says, "in effect becomes a jury of one. He or she must determine the governess's guilt or innocence... If the ghosts are real, then she is sane, and her desperate efforts to protect her dear charges, though doomed in the end, are noble and self-sacrificing. If the ghosts are mere illusions, then she is suffering a bout of insanity, in which her 'revelations' about the children’s unearthly communications, and her perception of them as allied to unspeakable evil, must reflect her deeply suppressed aggressions and hostility... But The Turn of the Screw is greater than either of these interpretations. Its profoundest pleasure lies in the beautifully fussed over way in which James refuses to come down on either side. In its twenty-four brief chapters, the book becomes a modest monument to the bold pursuit of ambiguity. It is rigorously committed to lack of commitment. At each rereading, you have to marvel anew at how adroitly and painstakingly James plays both sides."

This is absolutely true. I listened. I read some commentary. And then I skimmed the written text again. And there's almost NOTHING in this story that can't be read two ways. Either way is pretty gruesome, mind you... Leithauser again: "If the governess is mad, she has unwittingly killed a bright and beautiful little boy; this is a tragedy, but a local one. If the ghosts are genuine, however, there are jagged cracks in the firmament above us all, and nobody is safe..."



***

John Pistelli sheds some interesting light on the somewhat unlikely origins of the story:

"According to Henry James’s Notebooks... he got the kernel of the novella, a ghost story, from the Archbishop of Canterbury: 'Saturday, January 12th, 1895. Note here the ghost-story told me at Addington (evening of Thursday 10th), by the Archbishop of Canterbury: the mere vague, undetailed, faint sketch of it -- being all he had been told (very badly and imperfectly), by a lady who had no art of relation, and no clearness: the story of the young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country-house, through the death, presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children; the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures, return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon, whom they invite and solicit, from across dangerous places, the deep ditch of a sunk fence, etc -- so that the children may destroy themselves, lose themselves, by responding, by getting into their power. So long as the children are kept from them, they are not lost; but they try and try and try, these evil presences, to get hold of them. It is a question of the children "coming over to where they are." It is all obscure and imperfect, the picture, the story, but there is a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect in it. The story to be told -- tolerably obviously -- by an outside spectator, observer.'"

Nothing is explained in the original story, and it seems to me that James builds that "nothing" into a towering edifice of questions, such as:

-- Why was Miles dismissed from school? What had he said, and where had he learnt it?
-- With whom was the governess in love? Her absent employer, or a much more troubling object?
-- What was the relationship between the frame narrator and Douglas? Why do they "fix" each other as they discuss the governess's motivations?

Pistelli goes on to conclude, and I completely agree: "James writes a perfectly ambiguous story -- a story as ambiguous as life itself. I am confident of only one thing about this book: James did not intend us to believe or to disbelieve in the ghosts, he intended us to notice the narrative’s irresolvable ambiguity. As [Shoshana] Felman observes, James, the author who will not tell us what his book means, is himself the absent Master."

Bravo. What a performance.