Henry JamesThe Turn of the Screw Henry James wrote The Turn of the Screw in 1898 and claimedthat he had found the germ of this story in a conversation withhis friend E. W. Benson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which ananecdote was told about wicked servants who, having charge of young children,‘corrupt and deprave’ them to a sinister degree.’ Later, in a letter to H. G.Wells, James described his story as a ‘jeu d’esprit’, although hisPreface to the tale offers a quite serious and elaborate analysis of what hewas trying to achieve. James’ satisfaction with his creation was echoedby the glowing reviews it immediately won, and it remains perhaps the mostartistically successful ghost story ever written, the subject of keen criticaldebate, and the vehicle for Benjamin Britten’s opera of the sametitle. Part of its success lies in its absolutely controlledconsistency of tone and style. The narrative of the governess who finds herselfin charge of two children in the lonely country house reveals, as James said,just enough of her character: rather prim, rather narrow, but sensitive andstrong, albeit self-involved. She does not seek to analyze what is happening toher and the children, but simply registers with great precision and intensityher powerful feelings of protective responsibility in the face of what she iscertain is pure evil. Exactly what that evil is remains undefined, mysterious -which is what James intended - but clearly the idea of diabolic possession isinvolved. The story was originally commissioned by a periodical forits Christmas number, and it opens with a group of friends telling storiesaround the fireside. Thus far, James conforms to the stereotypicalexpectations of the genre; but as the story unfolds we enter an increasinglyhorrible sense of a pervasive evil which first takes the form of the deadservants Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, but is then (and most dreadfully) foundin the children themselves, seraphically charming as they seem to be. Thegoverness then sees her task as the recovery of the children from their demonicinfluences. She is aided in this by the prosaic but good-hearted housekeeper,Mrs. Grose, but must otherwise work alone as her (absent) employer has imposedas a condition of her employment that she must ‘never trouble him…neitherappeal nor complain nor write about anything.’ James makes it clear that the governess is more or lessinfatuated by her mysterious, Rochester-like employer, and this is where thecritical debate about the story begins. Two main views emerge. The ‘Freudian’school, headed by Edmund Wilson, believe the ghosts to be neurotichallucinations by the governess, projections of her guilty and repressed sexualfeelings: what, after all, distinguished Quint and Jessel was their illicitsexual liaison. Morris Fraser claims that we should look at James’ allegedpedophiliac feelings and see that ‘the horror’ of Quint is Henry James’horror of his own sexuality. These theories are clearly not entirelysatisfactory: they do not account for Miles’ expulsion from school or his stealingof the letter, for instance - yet they importantly focus on the hystericallypossessive nature of the governess’ response to the ‘horrors’. At the end ofthe story, Miles screams out ‘Peter Quint - you devil!’ and it is unclearwhether or not he is identifying and renouncing Quint, or in fact accusing thegoverness of being a devil. The ‘turn of the screw’ of the title refers to theidea that the possession of children by evil forces is perhaps the most horrifyingthing we can imagine and the whole story is given enormous power by its(undoubtedly ambiguous) sexual overtones, whether or not one accepts theFreudian interpretations. Henry James (1843-1916) was born in New York and settled inLondon in 1875. He moved to Lamb House, Rye, in 1898; became aBritish subject in 1915; and was awarded the Order of Merit in the year of hisdeath. His fiction is of a highly refined and intelligent subtlety, analyzingthought, motive and feeling with brilliant psychological insight and (at times)some obscurity of style. Much of his early fiction (Portrait of a Lady, 1881)deals with the impact of the old world uponthe new, and this transatlantictheme recurs in later works like The Ambassadors (1903). In between, he studiesEnglish life and character in such works as The Spoils of Poynton (1897). He is generally regarded as one of the great founders of themodern novel. Notes by Perry Keenlyside About the Readers Emma Fielding trained at RSAMD. She has worked at the RoyalNational Theatre in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia and the RSC in Twelfth Night andJohn Ford’s The Broken Heart for which she won the Dame Peggy Ashcroft Awardfor Best Actress. She also won the Ian Charleson Award. Emma Fielding has alsoappeared in numerous radio plays for the BBC. Dermot Kerrigan trained at the LAMDA and has since appearedin much Shakespearean theater including: Richard II at the Royal Exchange,Manchester; Romeo and Juliet (TV); with the RSC at Stratford, as well as modernplays at The Royal Court and extensive touring with Shared Experience.