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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Gothic
Upon seeing Peter Quint’s figure perched on the tower, the governess wonders, “Was there a secret at Bly—a mystery of Udolpho, or an insane, unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement?” (21). These references to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) reveal that the governess enjoys gothic novels, as did many middle-class British women of the 19th century. Exemplified by Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Victorian gothic novels feature a set of standard elements: a young, innocent woman trapped in an isolated, castle-like mansion; an atmosphere of brooding, often supernatural terror; the discovery of a dark secret or mystery; and an enigmatic, handsome gentleman.
Conventional gothic motifs suffuse the governess’s own story of her harrowing adventures at Bly. She underscores her youth and inexperience when, pondering her new “circumstances” (12) at Bly, she admits, “they had, as it were, an extent and mass for which I had not been prepared and in the presence of which I found myself, freshly, a little scared not less than a little proud” (12). This perception of herself as an innocent girl surrounded by looming threats soon gives way to the impression that she is living in “a castle of romance […] such a place as would somehow […] take all colour out of story-books and fairy-tales” (13). The governess, writing her account many years later, scorns the idyllic notions of her younger self, declaring Bly nothing but “a big ugly antique […] house” (13). As if to dispel any ideas that her story is a fairy-tale, the governess retrospectively adds the gothic motif of lurking terror, hinting that the unsuspected horrors to come give “the previous time a charm of stillness—that hush in which something gathers or crouches. The change was actually like the spring of a beast” (19). The beast is Peter Quint, followed by Miss Jessel, whose ghostly apparitions provide the tale with supernatural frights. By her own account, the governess bravely battles the demons, emboldened by her conviction that her enigmatic, handsome employer would admire her valor. Finally, the sinister mystery that preoccupies the governess and informs her fight to save Miles’s soul is the question of what he did at school.
Because the governess writes her account retrospectively, her story is composed of two perspectives at once: the limited viewpoint of her younger self, and the almost omniscient viewpoint of her older self. The governess, as writer, exploits the tension between these two perspectives to heighten the suspense and brooding terror of her tale. Just as she warns of crouching beasts where her younger self sees a fairy-tale paradise, the older governess repeatedly interrupts rosy descriptions of her days with the children to foreshadow doom. In this way, the governess instills her story with gothic suspense as she writes it, and she confers upon herself powers of omniscience that she could not claim as a young woman—or as any variety of woman—in 19th-century England.
The Ghosts
The ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel function as symbols, but what they represent varies depending on how readers interpret the story. If, as one prevailing interpretation claims, the children’s innocence is in jeopardy, and the virtuous governess is fighting to save their souls from evil forces, then the ghosts symbolize those forces. More specifically, they symbolize the evil that tempts the innocent to sin, an archetypal Christian form of evil that the Bible figures as the snake in Eden. Quint and Miss Jessel are “of the damned” (71) for sins they committed, the nature of which is likely sexual, although it’s never fully disclosed. While living at Bly, Quint and Miss Jessel lured the children down the path of sin, and the demonic pair, returned from hell, wishes “to ply them with that evil still” (57), to tempt their souls into damnation. The governess tells Mrs. Grose, “The success of the tempters is only a question of time” (58), and because the symbolic value of the tempters—Quint and Miss Jessel—transcends the story, the governess’s words resonate beyond their context, too, warning readers that no one can escape sin.
The other widespread and equally competitive interpretation of the story views the ghosts as hallucinations, or products of the governess’s troubled psyche. These troubles stem from the moral conflict she experiences due to emerging feelings of sexual desire. Raised in a religious household within a society that demonizes bodily desires—particularly those of a woman—the governess has internalized an association of horror and immorality with sexuality. She cannot reconcile her sexual feelings for her employer with her understanding of herself as a woman of faith and respectability, so she represses her desires. According to Freudian theory, although the repressed content of the subconscious disappears from the conscious mind, it continues to haunt the mind as an unnamable apprehension. Thus, if the ghosts are the governess’s subconsciousness projections, they represent the horror and dread she attaches to sexuality.
Windows and Frames
Of the four times the governess sees Peter Quint’s apparition, three are through a real or imagined frame. She first spies him staring down at her from the tower, and she thinks, “The man who looked at me over the battlements was as definite as a picture in a frame” (20). He next appears to her through the dining room window, as he does during their final encounter. The one time the governess does not see Quint through a frame, she nevertheless notes he is near one on the stairs: “The apparition had reached the landing halfway up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window” (48). Each time the governess sees the figure of Quint, there is a frame, or threshold, between them.
Taking a cue from Freudian interpretations of James’s story, these threshold episodes arguably represent moments when a window briefly opens between the governess’s conscious and subconscious minds. If Quint symbolizes her horror of sexuality, her visions of him are visions of the dreadful desires she has repressed. Indeed, when the governess shares with Mrs. Grose her first impressions of Quint, she does so inarticulately, using terms that apply just as well to the unspeakable contents of her own subconscious: “What is he? He’s a horror. […] He’s—God help me if I know what he is” (27). Quint never crosses the thresholds that frame him, so it follows that the horrors of the governess’s subconsciousness never fully penetrate her conscious mind. She faces them only to push them back down, just as she faces Quint’s figure ascending the stairs and, holding her ground, sends it “straight down the staircase and into the darkness” (49).
The Pond
With its mysterious depths and reflective surface, the pond at Bly both represents and mirrors the governess’s subconsciousness. The governess has repressed her sexual feelings, but they continue to haunt her consciousness, afflicting her with a nebulous sense of guilt and unworthiness. Identifying sexual guilt and depravity with Miss Jessel, the governess projects her own self-loathing onto her hallucinations of the former governess, whose apparition “rose erect” (83) from the pond, as if rising from the governess’s subconscious. The figure the governess sees twice at the water’s edge is one of “unmistakable horror” (37), whose “long reach of […] desire” reflects the governess’s suppressed fears that she cannot escape her own monstrous desires.
Doubling
Throughout the narrative the governess finds herself inadvertently repeating several of the ghosts’ behaviors. This pattern of doubling supports the argument that the ghosts are products of the governess’s subconscious mind. One example of doubling occurs after the governess sees Quint’s apparition peering in at the dining room window. She rushes outside, explaining, “It was confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room” (25-26). In this moment the governess becomes what she fears. She effectively assumes the terrifying aspect of Quint and frightens Mrs. Grose, who happens to enter the room. By doubling Quint’s actions and their consequences, the governess collapses the distance between herself and the horrors he represents, suggesting that she identifies them as a part of herself.
Following the governess’s confrontation with Miles in the churchyard, she returns to Bly alone and sinks onto the bottom of the staircase. Realizing “that it was exactly where, more than a month before, in the darkness of the night and just so bowed with evil things, I had seen the spectre of the most horrible of women” (69), Miss Jessel, the governess stands and goes to the schoolroom. There she sees Miss Jessel’s figure, seated at the very desk where the governess herself sits. This episode of doubling suggests that the governess herself is “bowed with evil things” (69). Miles has just rejected her attentions and thereby agitated the guilt and horror surrounding her subconscious attraction to her employer, and perhaps to Miles. She describes Miss Jessel’s figure sitting at her desk as “dishonoured and tragic” and shouts, “You terrible miserable woman!” (69), but the governess may well be referring to herself.
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