Euphemism In The Turn Of The Screw

April 15, 1843 Henry James was born in New York City into a wealthy family. James’s gothic novella, The Turn of the Screw has been criticized throughout the ages but no one is really sure what the story is really about. The book seems to be less influenced by James’s personal life and more by the Victorian time period. Three years before The Turn of the Screw was published, there was a huge scandal that went down with a rather famous writer named Oscar Wilde, who was well known for his work The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde was a “criminalized homosexual” and had been linked to the Cleveland Street affair where “telegraph delivery boys to be employed part-time as prostitutes in a male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street” (Kaplan). James followed the trials closely and wrote a few
James seems to think that this whole scandal could be an interesting thing to explore following the “aftershocks of this cultural ‘earthquake.’” (Matheson). Wilde influenced James’s writing by opening a new social gap in that society’s time. It must have been a frightening time too, “of coming to terms with same-sex sexuality, to invent language for its designation, control, and prosecution”, no wonder James choose to write a novella with “suggestive yet sheltering language of euphemism and denotative, confessional discourse that would expose ‘monstrous’ secrets.” (Matheson). In the beginning of The Turn of the Screw there is a Prologue, which is told by an unnamed narrator, where a character that we meet named Douglass, who has a crush on the governess, whose story he will be telling. The setting is at a party around Christmas time and the guests are telling ghost stories. Douglass says “Nobody but me, till now, has ever heard. It’s quite too horrible.” yet when one reads the story, it is quite stirring, nevertheless is it really “quite too horrible”? (115; ch. 1) Maybe if one looks in-between the lines then one can