The Novella

A. James states that the novella was intended only as an amusette.

B. James interested in artistic potential of story.

C. Is the novella a ghost story or does it bear deeper psychological meaning?

II. Edmund Wilson's "The Ambiguity of The Turn of the Screw"

A. Summary of Wilson's Freudian analysis.

B. The Novella is available to double interpretation.

C. James chose to collect the novella with other psychological studies.

III. The problems with Wilson's Freudian analysis.

A. James's own letters describing the theme of the novella.

B. Evans's analysis of James's letters and stated intentions.

C. Evans's and Fagin's interpretation of the novella as a story about good against evil.

Henry James's The Turn of the Screw

Henry James asked only that The Turn of the Screw be considered as "a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught . . . , the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious" (Fagin 154). However, critics "not easily caught" have been fascinated with the novella since its publication, denying James's claim that it is no more than an amusette. Fagin states that students of James should be aware that his interest in any series of incidents was not confined to their dramatic value or their realistic impact (154). Rather, he was interested in their artistic potential. For him, a story lay "not in mere physical plot, but in the undercurrent of suggestion and implic

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he letters in which James made perfectly clear that The Turn of the Screw was intended as a tale of the supernatural (202). In a letter to A.C. Benson (March 11, 1898), James declared the story was a "small and gruesome spectral story." Then, a few months later, he wrote to Dr. Louis Waldstein that it was merely a "wanton little tale" unworthy of such praise as Waldstein had apparently given it. He continued: "My bogey-tale dealt with things so hideous that I felt that to save it at all I needed some infusion of beauty or prettiness . . .. But ah, the exposure indeed, the helpless plasticity of childhood that isn't dear or sacred to somebody: That was my little tragedy!" (Evans 202). Evans argues that the tragedy to which James referred was the corruption of the two children by the living servants, and the possession (in the supernatural sense) of them afterwards by the ghosts of these servants (202). He disagrees that, in the light of James's own words, the story could have been intended simply as "a mere case history of a governess subject to hallucinations" (Evans 202-03). Evans offers further evidence to support his assertions. For example, in a letter to H.G. Wells (December 9, 1898), who had apparently objected tha

Category: Literature - T