82 pages • 2 hours read
Henry JamesThe Turn of the Screw
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1898A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 4-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Shocked, the governess remains motionless for long moments, trying to account for the stranger’s presence on the tower. She returns to the house, still mulling the mystery, and finds Mrs. Grose in the hall. The housekeeper’s face is so friendly, the governess cannot bear to trouble her with news of her startling vision and says nothing about it.
By quietly observing other members of the household over the following days, the governess concludes that no one else knows an intruder somehow gained access to the tower. The incident is her concern alone, but the “charming work” (23) of teaching and caring for such remarkably lovely children soon dispels her lingering worries. Miles, in particular, dazzles the governess with his beauty. By means of his gentle, innocent disposition, he renders the headmaster’s insinuations against him absurd. The governess decides that Miles was “too fine and fair for the little horrid unclean school-world” (23), and thus the headmaster, overcome with envy, expelled him.
One Sunday afternoon, the governess walks into the empty dining room and stops in her tracks. The mysterious stranger is standing outside the window, pressing his face to the glass. Although she is terrified, a sense of duty compels the governess to race outdoors and around the house to confront the man. But he has vanished without a trace. Just as the governess steps before the window herself and peers inside, as the stranger did, Mrs. Grose enters the dining room. The housekeeper pales with fright, and then she, too, rushes outside to the spot where the governess stands.
Chapter 5 Summary
Unable to hide her alarm, the governess now tells Mrs. Grose about the intruder. She describes the man as “a horror” but at Mrs. Grose’s urging, provides a more detailed picture: “He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale face, […] and rather queer whiskers that are as red as his hair” (28-29). Hearing this description, Mrs. Grose blanches and says it fits Peter Quint, who served as valet for the children’s uncle last year, when the latter resided at Bly. After the uncle moved to London, Quint remained and was “in charge” (29). The governess asks what became of Quint, and Mrs. Grose declares, “He died” (29).
Chapter 6 Summary
The realization that she has seen a ghost momentarily paralyzes the governess with fear. After she recovers her wits, she and Mrs. Grose retreat to the schoolroom to discuss the situation. While the housekeeper herself has never witnessed the apparition—and nor, apparently, has anyone else living at Bly—she does not doubt the governess’s testimony. They discuss the evening’s horrifying revelations and pledge to “bear things together” (30). Midnight approaches, but before the women retire, the governess shares her conviction that Peter Quint is seeking Miles. Mrs. Grose objects, as the implications of the idea are too monstrous, but she then concedes that Quint “liked to play with him” and “was much to free” (32) with the boy, and everyone else. Because she feared Quint’s retaliation, Mrs. Grose never reported his unseemly behavior to their employer in London. Quint pursued his wicked ways unchecked for several months until one winter night he suffered a fatal fall on the ice after a drinking spree at the public house.
Certain she will see Quint again, the governess finds courage in her determination to protect the children at all costs, resolving to divert Quint’s attention from her charges by offering herself “as an expiatory victim” (31). Her ploy gives her a sense of purpose and even pleasure. Imagining her heroic act of self-sacrifice, she notes that “there would be a greatness in letting it be seen” (33) and admired by the right person, namely the children’s uncle.
One afternoon, the governess and Flora walk to the pond without Miles. While Flora plays by the water, the governess turns her attention to her needlework but soon senses that someone is watching them from across the pond. The governess stares at her work, fearful of lifting her eyes, but finally manages to look at Flora. The girl is crafting a boat with her back to the pond. For some moments, the governess rests her eyes on Flora as she rallies her courage, then directs her gaze across the pond.
Chapter 7 Summary
Afterward, the governess seeks out Mrs. Grose to share her despair and her newfound apprehension of an even greater horror: Flora is well aware of the ghastly apparition and doesn’t want the governess to know it. The governess explains that another phantom appeared to them at the pond, but this time “a woman in black, pale and dreadful” (37). The ghoul latched her awful gaze on Flora, clearly signaling her desire to “get hold of her” (38). That Flora knows and accepts the spectral woman’s intentions is, as the governess says, “too monstrous” (36).
The governess never met her predecessor, Miss Jessel, but she is certain that the spirit at the pond was the former governess. Mrs. Grose admits that Miss Jessel became infamous for her cavalier association with Peter Quint. Although she was a lady, she allowed Quint to debase her with his depravity, and they “did what [… they] wished” (39) with one another. When the governess suggests that Miss Jessel’s debauchery may have occasioned her leaving—and even her death—Mrs. Grose remains evasive but agrees the situation was dreadful. A sense of defeat overwhelms the governess, and she tearfully sobs that she cannot “save or shield” (40) the children, for they are already lost to corruption.
Chapter 8 Summary
Later that night the governess and Mrs. Grose meet in the schoolroom to talk over the day’s developments. The governess reaffirms her conviction that Flora perceived Miss Jessel’s presence at the pond, was in “communion” (41) with the fiend, and has made a habit of it. Although Mrs. Grose shows no signs of doubting her account, the governess points out that had she fabricated the whole affair, she could not have produced descriptions that match those of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, whom she’d never seen before.
The governess’s painstaking review of her experience at the pond prepares her to ask the housekeeper a question that has haunted her: “What was it you had in mind when, […] before Miles came back, […] you didn’t pretend for him he hadn’t literally ever been ‘bad’?” (42). Mrs. Grose reveals that, when Quint was at Bly, Miles was his constant companion for several months. Even after the housekeeper admonished the boy for consorting with a “base menial” (42), he continued to disappear with Quint for hours, and then lied about it. Moreover, Miles impudently told Mrs. Grose that if Quint was a base menial, then so was she. Miss Jessel, for her part, did nothing to stop Miles and Quint’s romps together, as they allowed her to be alone with Flora.
Chapters 4-8 Analysis
This group of chapters complicates the governess’s earlier conflation of beauty with innocence by introducing the corrupting influence of sexuality. Once again, the governess’s account rings with Christian overtones. If the children at Bly recall Adam and Eve as innocents in the Garden of Eden, then Quint is the bad-faith actor who pollutes their purity by revealing unspeakable, carnal knowledge. James scholars have noted that Quint’s appearance codes him as evil, particularly his red hair, which is a feature commonly associated with Satan. The governess bravely embraces her role as the guardian of innocence. Called on to “absolutely save” (31) the children from sin, she commits herself to a messiah-like self-sacrifice “by accepting, by inviting” (31) the evil upon herself and “serv[ing] as an expiatory victim” (31). By Chapter 7, however, the governess despairs that Flora is lost, damned. Like her biblical prototype Eve, Flora is a willing participant in her own corruption, accepting the attentions of the ill-intentioned demons.
For several decades after The Turn of the Screw first appeared, readers commonly understood it as a ghost story featuring a savior figure who, with the courage of her Christian convictions, opposes the evil forces preying on the souls of the children. The publication of Edmund Wilson’s essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James” (1934) upended this established reading and launched critical thinking about the novella in a new direction. Informed by Sigmund Freud’s theories of sexuality and the subconscious, Wilson’s essay argues that the governess suffers from sexual hysteria, a psychological disorder that induces her hallucinations of Quint and Miss Jessel. The Turn of the Screw is not a ghost story, then, but a study of the governess’s psychosexual neurosis. Raised in a vicarage, the sheltered young governess is sexually inexperienced and, moreover, has internalized the religious and Victorian prohibition against bodily desires. Her attraction to her employer throws her into a moral dilemma, and, in keeping with Freudian theory, she represses her sexual desire, driving it into her subconscious. Notably, she is in the garden, fantasizing about a serendipitous (albeit entirely innocent) encounter with her employer, when she first sees Quint. His direct stare, replete with sexual innuendo, troubles her, and he perches on a tower, a clearly phallic symbol, according to Freudian logic. In this interpretation of the novella, the governess is an unreliable narrator; the ambiguities and repressions that ripple through her story obscure both its origins and—as will become more evident—its meaning.
Doubling, as a literary device, occurs in Chapter 4 and will recur in future chapters, serving as a motif that illustrates the governess’s divided psyche. After the governess sees Peter Quint outside the dining room window, she rushes out to confront him but finds the space before the window empty. She reflects, “It was confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he stood. I did so; applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room” (25-26). When Mrs. Grose enters the room and blanches with fright, the governess effectively assumes the role of Peter Quint and becomes what she fears. By means of such doubling, the narrative identifies the governess with the ghosts, suggesting they may be projections of her subconscious sexual apprehensions. Just after this second sighting of Quint, however, the governess distances herself from the apparitions and their purposes. She tells Mrs. Grose that Quint “was looking for little Miles. […] That’s whom he was looking for” (31). She can’t explain how she arrived at this conclusion, leaving open the possibility that she is displacing her own repressed sexual desires onto the ghosts and children.
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