The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: Governess' Perspective

Everyone likes to watch a horror movie now and then, the thrill of trying to figure out who’s waiting behind the door gives the audiences a feel of suspense which drives people to continue coming. Directors have the luxury of using visual effects and surround sound to captivate its audiences but unlike directors, authors don’t have that luxury. If authors don’t have technological enhancement’s to grasp their readers then what forms of methods do they use? Unlike directors, authors such as Henry James rely on the narrator to evoke suspense to their readers. Henry James’ well renowned novel The Turn of the Screw evokes suspense by having an unreliable narrator which the novel is mostly seen through her eyes. By witnessing the story through the governess’s perspective the readers become unsure of her reliability which induces tension and disconnection; but still the readers become an active participant through her journey. A literary critic named Edward Wilson explores deeper into the thoughts of our narrator. In his novel The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects, Wilson comes to the conclusion that “ the governess who is made to tell the story is a neurotic case of sex repression, and the ghosts are not real ghosts but hallucinations of the governess” ( Wilson,88). Having limited knowledge of the readers narrator the governess, Edward Wilson’s paratext opens up an explanation of her unreliability that could be caused by her sexual repression which is pertinent to her mental instability.

The readers see early signs of sexual repression within the narrator in the end of chapter one. The passage introduces a connection between the governess’ hallucinations and her sexual repression.

The governess says, ” No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting