Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1989.īell, Millicent. Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James: “The Turn of the Screw” at the Turn of the Century. New Haven: Yale UP, 1919.īeidler, Peter G. “The Berkelian Ghosts at Bly.” Henry James and the Occult. “ ‘A Fury of Intention’: The Scandal of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.” Sydney Studies in English 15 (1989–90): 140–52.īanta, Martha. “The Governess and the Ghosts in The Turn of the Screw.” Henry James Review 1 (1979): 73–80.Īnderson, Don. “Another Twist to The Turn of the Screw.” Modern Fiction Studies 13 (1967): 167–78.Īllen, John J. Gaskell’s ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’: A Link between Wuthering Heights and The Turn of the Screw.” Notes and Queries 8 (1961): 101–02.Īldrich, C. The fact that the two readings seem mutually exclusive - how, after all, can a woman be both sane and insane, how can ghosts be both real and imaginary? - has not prevented a third position from emerging in recent years: that The Turn of the Screw is at once both a ghost story and a psychological study.Īlcott, Miriam. It is an amazingly fine creepy, scary, soul-shuddering ghost story or, alternatively, it is an amazingly fine psychological case study of a neurotic young woman. The two basic readings are so radically different and so apparently mutually exclusive that it is amazing that both sides have agreed on one essential fact: that The Turn of the Screw is a wonderfully successful story. Indeed, that question - and the fun that scholars and their students have had debating it - has elevated to star status what might otherwise have been seen as a rather ordinary James story. It is almost impossible to read the story without taking sides and almost impossible to approach the story critically without knowing where one stands on it. Are Peter Quint and Miss Jessel real in the sense that they are spirits of the dead come back to haunt the living? Or are they real only in the sense that the governess has hallucinations that make them seem real to her? Do they haunt the children or do they haunt only the governess’s troubled imagination? Virtually every book and article on The Turn of the Screw - and there have been hundreds - deals at least indirectly with that question.

The fundamental question dealt with in the scholarship on The Turn of the Screw is how real the ghosts are.

Edmund wilson turn of the screw