Henry James, the author of The Turn of The Screw, produced the story with a strong connection of his mind toward the readers’ psyche. To process this connection, James also had described his work throughout his main character’s inner life. The main character’s inner life is also showing the reflection of the human mental process in general. Like Ross Murfin writes in “Psychoanalyst Criticism and The Turn of the Screw” that “psychoanalytic critic such as Holland began to focus more on the ways in which authors create works that appeal to our repressed wishes and fantasies” (308). Therefore, this engagement is to identify the author’s issue that could help the readers to discover their own mental developments as well. As human was imperfect …show more content…
To reflect this motivation, James showed governess personality as a person who inspirited by positive self-talk to face with a conflict of her new training style. To keep up with her persistence, she committed herself to train and to take a good care of those children as she thought that their behavior was influenced by other adults. Even if she had a difficult time to manage those children’s misbehavior, but James presented that she tried her best to challenge the situation difficulty. Like religious influence, this encouragement also connected to James’s religious believe. He also illustrated the governess’s brave to compete with the ghosts as she was a member of the Christian community (James 51). Similar Lydenberg declaring, the strength of the governess’s characteristic was considered as “her central to the religious interpretation of the story” (4). The religious influential like human encouragement, both are a primary function to motivation people facing with their difficult situation. As people have their own believe and learn how to think positively, this encourage them to learn how to be more persistent with their …show more content…
The self- recognition is to understand the ability and the feeling of individual his or herself. James presented that governess sometime feeling trouble to control those children as they seemed to be smarter than her— “she expresses a need to confess her troubles at Bly” (Zacharias 323). However, James brought up a fancy power of ghost associate with the story to engage the reader or audiences’ thought. With an ambiguous meaning, the reader could support or against this point. The truth based on the governess herself and the audiences’ experiences. If the ghost story is true, the governess acted as a “heroine” to save those children from those fancy power (329). However, James also displayed that the governess had limited power or ability. Then James explored himself as the governess’s realization that she could not compare with her anti-supporters (ghost). This surrender is similar to self-guilty and struggling. As governess put herself in fear and unaware of children’s behavior, she seemed unable to perform her duty to satisfy her master. She gave up her challenging with the girl or ghost, then sent her back to her uncle in London (James 110). Self- realization is understandable of human ability and weakness that humans could manage or unable to manage in any difficult
The article on the fantasy within the novella reveals the debate of the governess’s mental state during her time with the children. The debacle that can be depicted within the work can be surrounded through the idea that her fantasies represent the point in which she is at her most anxious. When her anxiety reaches a certain peak, the ghost then appears. This can especially be seen just before the first sighting, when she says, “I was giving pleasure-if he ever thought of it! - to the person to whose pressure I had yielded” (38). The pressure she is experiencing allows her mental state to bring out the fantasy aspect of the apparition. Using Zacharias’s article, the audience can see the fantasy is a mechanism that is used by the governess and
Henry James's Turn of the Screw was written in a time when open sexuality was looked down upon. On the surface, the story is simply about a governess taking care of two children who are haunted by two ghosts. However, the subtext of the story is about the governess focusing on the children's innocence, and the governess trying to find her own sexual identity. Priscilla L. Walton wrote a gender criticism themed essay about the Turn of the Screw, which retells certain parts of the story and touches on the significance they provide for the sexually explicit theme. Walton's essay is accurate because James purposely put an undertone of sexuality and identity confusion in the Turn of the Screw.
James life, causes him to struggle with his self-actualization because he does not know who he is or his true identity. However, because he knows so little about his own life, he is led to ask questions and find out answers. “Yet I myself had no idea who I was. I loved my mother yet I looked nothing like her. Neither did I look like the role-models in my life” (91). The only way he figures out who he is, is by asking questions and finding bits and pieces of information. He struggles greatly with himself, and the only way for him to know himself is to know his mother. This gets back to the idea that the parallelism between him and his mother, or chapters 9 and 10, helps him in his
Readers might wonder with whom she was in love. Then the Master told the Governess about the previous governess and her death (James 296). The readers probably want to know the reason of the previous governess' death. When the Master talked about the duties of the Governess, he required her not to contact him in any way (James 297). We do not know why he made that requirement. As the story continues, the readers have many more unsolved questions such as why Miles was dismissed from school, why the Governess could describe Peter Quint exactly though she never meet him, and why the Governess thought that ghosts wanted to catch the two children. Ned Lukacher thinks that "[the way James] has said something also becomes a way of not having said something else" (132). For instance, James revealed some hints regarding the reason Miles was dismissed. We know that "[Miles]'s an injury to the others" (304) and Mrs. Grose thought Miles was "no boy for [her]" (305). However, these hints do not help the readers to completely understand why Miles was sent away from his school. Instead, more questions are posed, such as how such a ten-year-old boy could injure other students and why Mrs. Grose thought about Miles that way. The readers can not easily find the specific and reasonable answers in the story, so they have to guess the answers based on their own
In Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw the governess believes that the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, the past governess, haunt Flora and Miles. The governess believes that they contribute to the poor behavior of Miles and Flora. The ghosts appear to be real to her when in all reality she is only imaging them. Whenever she sees Miss Jessel or Peter Quint, Miles, Flora, and Miss Grose do not seem to see them. The governess may be seen as a heroine in this story, but her insanity appears in many examples throughout The Turn of the Screw.
One of the most critically discussed works in twentieth-century American literature, The Turn of the Screw has inspired a variety of critical interpretations since its publication in 1898. Until 1934, the book was considered a traditional ghost story. Edmund Wilson, however, soon challenged that view with his assertions that The Turn of the Screw is a psychological study of the unstable governess whose visions of ghosts are merely delusions. Wilson’s essay initiated a critical debate concerning the interpretation of the novel, which continues even today (Poupard 313). Speculation considering the truth of the events occurring in The Turn of the Screw depends greatly on the reader’s assessment of the reliability of the governess as a
Reading a narrative from a psychoanalytic perspective can prove to be a sometimes frustrating experience. Psychoanalysis often disregards the actual texts and verbal context of a piece of literature in favor of the Freudian and Lacanian ideas, which seek to find encrypted motifs in the depths of every creation in order to reveal the author’s unconscious mind. Nevertheless, the critiques of psychoanalytic interpretation of literature claim that such interpretations focus on the content of the text at the expense of the literary form and temporal dimension, which can reduce the literary plots to lifeless machinations. Furthermore, psychoanalytic interpretation of a text may tell us less about the author’s unconscious mind and more about the
This, of course, spawns another problem. With an author who is only concerned with showing the reader how it affected himself, you are deprived of what you really want to know about a given character. James has eleven brothers and sisters, all of which have something to add to the story, and yet the exposition given to each of them is far from satisfactory. Much more detail could have been given on what they thought of their mother, how each of them found out about her, who teaches and lives the motto "Don't tell anyone your business." For this reason, the children have the challenge of digging up the truth about their mother, and James takes it to the next level, by writing a book.
To truly understand a great novel and its author, the reader must dig deep inside the life
Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw has been described as one of the best ghost stories of all time. However, there is clear evidence that the main character, the governess, suffers from delusions. The strange events that occur throughout the story happen in the estate of Bly. The anomalies, described as horrors or ghosts, only come to light after the governess arrives. These events are due to creations of the governess ' mind, her controlling intent to protect and overrule the children, and her unstable mental state. In this way, her thoughts and her actions are the cause of the strange events at Bly.
Additionally, James reinforces the female gothic conventions by utilizing the supernatural to drive the Governess into madness. After her encounter with Peter’s ghost, the house’s “darkness and quietness close in” onto her while she “circles about the place” as the overwhelming feeling of curiosity consumes her (James 27). This sublime of the truth “heightening or setting up terrible things” that will occur at the Bly mansion (Burke 381). The pleasure of knowing of this hidden truth drives the protagonist to seek it out even though there may not be a “ultimate truth”. The Governess’s obsession of finding this “truth” worsens throughout the storyline that her imagination portrays this ideal image of heroism of herself. The Governess seems to have a habit of fantasying of an alter reality where she is
Finally, the main aim of Aswell's work was to emphasize the fact the ghosts were just “mirror images of herself”, a reflection and a distortion of the governess in Henry James' novel. A distortion of the reality made the governess correlate the children with the ghosts since Peter Quint appeared to her “in response to the invocation
Henry James’ arrays of characters helps to tie the reality of social conflict in this fictional horror story. His characters each have various economic backgrounds and interact differently with each other. This diversity brings these social conflicts to light and helps readers understand the root of these conflicts. In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James uses characterization and conflict to reveal the horrors of social class in American society.
On the first hand, Helen Killoran's work is taking another angle since she focuses on the relations servants have instead of the prevailling debate on the governess's wit. Thus, she asserts that as Eric Solomon said in his essay, Mrs Grose is the governess's enemy and de facto the one who triggers her hallucinations. Nevertheless, there is a paralell between the assumptions of the governess that the evil influences came from the late servants and Eric Solomon who considers that the living servant have a nefarious influence on the children. Indeed, the main issue in this text and in the preceding one is that the preeminent threat comes from the adults. Plus, the rivalry between Mrs Grose and the governess might also be a strife to be the only
The Turn of the screw by Henry James is regarded as one of the most fascinating psychological thrillers of all time. Published in the late nineteenth century, this novella sets up a narrative story of a young lady who appears to have seen the ghost of the former dead employers of the place where she was working. In this novella Henry James combined drama, suspense, and mystery to make it one of the most preferred stories among the readers of all generations. The Turn of the Screw raises many questions, however: Is the governess going crazy? Is she really seeing the phantoms of those dead former state workers? Is she innocent? Is she the villain or the heroine of