I need to get a draft paper for my class on The Turn of the Screw. See attached instructions, and outline for my paper. YOU MUST USE THE 6 ARTICLES I ATTACHED ON PDF.
The Henry James Review 30 (2009): 237–240.© 2009, The Johns Hopkins University Press
Pure Evil: “The Turn of
the Screw”
By Colm Tóibín
In January 1895, when Henry James was in the depths of depression due to
the failure of Guy Domville, the Archbishop of Canterbury told him the story that
became “The Turn of the Screw.” James wrote in his notebook:
Note here the ghost-story told me at Addington (evening of Thursday
10th), by the Archbishop of Canterbury . . . the story of the young children
. . . left to the care of servants in an old country-house, through the death,
presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and
deprave the children. . . . The servants die (the story vague about the way of
it) and their apparitions, figures, return to haunt the house and children, to
whom they seem to beckon. . . . It is all obscure and imperfect, the picture,
the story, but there is a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect in it. The
story to be told . . . by an outside spectator, observer. (CN 109)
James let the story ferment in his mind for more than two and a half years before
he set to work on it. Although for most of his career he was sadly aware that his books
would never attract a large audience, there were times when he directly and openly
sought popularity. The year 1897, when James took up again the Archbishop’s story,
was one of them. Through his friend William Dean Howells he had made contact
with a new young editor at Collier’s Magazine in the United States, to whom he sold
the serial rights for his new fiction. He deliberately made “The Turn of the Screw” as
frightening and dramatic as he could because he needed a new audience in America.
So frightening, indeed, that he actually frightened himself. When he came to correct
the proofs of the story, which was serialized over twelve issues in 1898, he told his
friend Edmund Gosse: “When I had finished them I was so frightened that I was afraid
to go upstairs to bed” (Gosse 38). The story, on publication, caused strong reaction. The New York Tribune called
it “one of the most thrilling stories we have ever read” (TS 151); the Outlook called
it “distinctly repulsive”; the Bookman “cruel and untrue” (153); the Independent
“the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature” (156). The 238 The Henry James Review
American Monthly Review of Reviews called it “the finest work he has ever done. . . .
a beautiful pearl: something perfect, rounded, calm, unforgettable” (155). Ainslee’s
Magazine, however, warned its readers in December 1898 that Henry James “is by
no means a safe author to give for a Christmas gift” (154). The story has had enormous influence: indirectly, for example, on the structure
and tone of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, begun very soon after Conrad read
“The Turn of the Screw,” and on films such as The Others, made in 2001, starring
Nicole Kidman. In 1954 Benjamin Britten’s opera based on the story was first pro-
duced. In 1971, Marlon Brando starred as the evil Peter Quint in The Nightcomers,
a dark prequel to James’s story. In 1974 ABC Television in the United States made a
rather clunky version of the story with Lynn Redgrave as the governess. But it is the
1961 adaptation, called The Innocents—scripted by William Archibald, who wrote
the Broadway play of the story, and Truman Capote, with some dialogue by John
Mortimer, and starring Deborah Kerr—that best catches the psychological eeriness,
the claustrophobia, and the essential ambiguity of the original story by\� James. James loved hearing half a story, which was what the Archbishop of Canter-
bury told him on 10 January 1895. He then could fill in the rest. “I wrought it into
a fantastic fiction,” he wrote to A. C. Benson, the Archbishop’s son, when the story
was finished (LHJ 279). To begin with, he framed the story. A man at a country
house party sends home for a long-locked-up manuscript to amuse and horrify his
companions. In this manuscript the story of the children—a boy and a girl—and the
dead, corrupt, haunting servants is recounted, in the first person, by the new govern-
ess arriving at a remote house where the children are unprotected. For even the laziest reader of “The Turn of the Screw,” the governess’s tone
appears overwrought and her attitude self-regarding. Soon, however, in the light of
what she begins to see and sense, this ceases to matter. There are phrases and scenes in
the book written with such skill and care and trickery as to make any reader follow it
with a great unease. James was right to be frightened. It is a very frig\�htening story. James told H. G. Wells that “The Turn of the Screw” was “essentially a pot-
boiler” (HJL 86), repeating the phrase ten days later to another correspondent, call-
ing it “a shameless pot-boiler” (88). The word “pot-boiler” might seem a way for
James to describe something less than holy, less than worthy, below the high line to
which he wanted his art to ascend. But in a letter to Hendrik Andersen, written eight
years later, he used the word “pot-boiler” to mean, as he explains, something “which
represents, in the lives of all artists, some of the most beautiful things ever done by
them” (BB 75). He was never simple, Henry James. This lack of simplicity is what gives “The Turn of the Screw” its power. It is,
on one level, a deeply and perhaps unconsciously autobiographical story. Because
of their restless father, the James children had no peer group or set of close friends
as they were growing up. They were looked after a great deal by their Aunt Kate. It
would not have been hard for Henry James to imagine an adolescent boy with no
friends who broke rules—his brother William was like that—or a strangely wilful
unprotected girl—his invalid sister Alice, who arrived in England in 1884 to be near
him, was like that. If an aspect of Henry James himself and his siblings became both Miles and Flora,
then a larger part of him became the governess. Composing the story in London while Pure Evil239
repairs were being done on his first house, imagining with friends and correspondents
what it was going to be like to travel alone to live in a home with a history. He was,
like his creation, thrilled and frightened at the prospect.
By the time he composed “The Turn of the Screw,” Henry James had ceased to
write in longhand and begun to dictate his stories and novels to a secretary. His first
“typewriter” was a dour Scot called MacAlpine. He told a friend how he had meant
“to scare the whole world with that story; . . . Judge of my dismay when from first
to last page this iron Scot betrayed not the slightest shade of feeling! I dictated to him
sentences that I thought would make him leap from his chair; he short-handed them
as though they had been geometry” (Phelps 324). In the twentieth century, the critics, led by Edmund Wilson, got to work on
the story with the same cold attitude as the Scottish amanuensis. The ghosts, it was
pointed out, were never actually seen by the children or by the housekeeper in the
story but by the governess alone. The ghosts, it was suggested, were aspects of the
deep neurosis that affected our hysterical governess. Rather than a ghost story, Wilson
concluded in 1934, “The Turn of the Screw” was “a study in morbid psychology”
(TS 172). The American poet and critic Alan Tate in 1942 supported Wilson: “James
knew substantially all that Freud knew before Freud came on the scene”\� (TS 176). The problem for the Freudian reading of the story is that, while the children do
not see the ghosts, the reader does. James invoked the evil and haunting presence of
the dead Peter Quint and Miss Jessel with consummate zeal and energy. He managed
to have it both ways. The ghosts existed, it is true, only in the mind of the governess;
the ghosts, more importantly, also give the reader the creeps. For anyone thinking of making a film of the story, this ambiguity was a god-
send. All you needed was a suggestive, vulnerable, and sexually repressed lead actress
(“I played it as if she were completely sane,” Kerr said [Loban and Valley]), a lot of
wild music, and some special effects as the ghosts peered in windows or stood on the
battlements of the remote house. The black and white film, directed by Jack Clayton, is quite beautiful. It too is
framed at the beginning, in this case by the appearance of Deborah Kerr’s pleading
hands and face, wonderfully lit. She is filmed from the side and insists rather too
emphatically for comfort that she loves the children and only wants to care for them.
The spooky atmosphere of the house is re-created with great subtlety (no cheap shock
tactics or easy effects). Megs Jenkins plays the deeply stupid housekeeper Mrs. Grose
as conscientious and kind-hearted and knowing her place. Slowly, as the camera moves
from wide scenes of faded opulence to tiny and frightening objects, Mrs. Grose’s ex-
pression becomes permanently worried and bewildered; she unwillingly reveals that
the two dead servants, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, were less than innoc\�ent. While in the Broadway play of the story the children actually see the ghosts
and in Britten’s opera Miles and Flora sing to them, here their innocence is ambigu-
ously preserved. They do not see what appears so dreadful and appalling to their
overwrought governess. But they are not all sweetness and light either. The sense that
they have been corrupted, or that there is an extraordinary bond between them, is
carefully dramatized. In James’s story, there is no explanation given for Miles’s expulsion from school.
In the 1974 television version, he is naughty and knowing and tortures animals; he 240The Henry James Review
is a fourteen-year-old boy who flirts with his governess, kissing her in one bedroom
scene. In the story, when the governess comes to his bedroom, Miles blows her candle
out. (This is repeated in Britten’s opera: “T’was I who blew it, who blew it, dear!”
[Britten 246].) And in The Innocents, even though Miles, played by Martin Stephens,
looks like a nine-year-old, he is not beyond coming on to his governess, his kisses
seeming deliberate and sexual rather than innocent and sweet. This causes the governess to believe even more that the children have been cor -
rupted as she makes mad plans to send Flora to her uncle, played with an amused
camp glint in his eye by Michael Redgrave. She wants to stay with Miles to confront
the ghastly Quint. As she becomes more and more hysterical, it is clear why Pauline
Kael called The Innocents “the best ghost movie I’ve ever seen” (McClelland 20) and
easy to mourn the fact that Henry James, when he finally took up residence at Lamb
House, did not have a DVD player in his drawing room, all the more to frighten him
so that he would, once more, be afraid to go to bed.
WORKS BY HENRY JAMES
CN—The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. Ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
BB—Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Anderson, 1899–1915. Ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi. Charlot- tesville: U of Virginia P, 2004.
HJL—Henry James Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. Vol. 4. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1984.
LHJ—The Letters of Henry James. Ed. Percy Lubbock. New York: Scribner, 1920.
TS—The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren. 2nd. ed. New York: Norton, 1999.
OTHER WORKS CITED
Britten, Benjamin. The Turn of the Screw, Op. 54, An Opera in a Prologue and Two Acts. Libretto, after
the story by Henry James, by Myfanwy Piper. London: Hawkes, 1966.
Gosse, Edmund. Aspects and Impressions. London: Cassell, 1922.
Loban, Leila, and Richard Valley. “Interview with Deborah Kerr.” Scarlet Street 21 (1995): 51–52.
McClelland, Doug. The Unkindest Cuts: The Scissors and the Cinema. New York: Barnes, 1972.
Phelps, William Lyon. The Advance of the English Novel. New York: Dodd, 1916.
FILMOGRAPHY
The Others. Screenplay by Alejandro Amenábar. Dir. Alejandro Amenábar. Perf. Nicole Kidman (Grace Stewart), Finnula Flanagan (Mrs. Bertha Mills), Christopher Ecceleston (Charles Stewart), Alakina
Mann (Anne Stewart), James Bentley (Nicholas Stewart), Eric Sykes (Mr. Edmund Tuttle), Elaine
Cassidy (Lydia). Cruise/Wagner Productions, 101 mins., 2001.
The Innocents (U.S.). Screenplay by William Archibald and Truman Capote, additional dialogue provided by John Mortimer. Dir. Jack Clayton. Photog. Freddie Francis. Music by Georges Aurric. Ed. James
Clark. Perf. Deborah Kerr (Miss Giddens/Governess), Michael Redgrave (Uncle), Megs Jenkins
(Mrs. Grose), Martin Stephens (Miles), Pamela Franklin (Flora), Peter Wyngarde (Peter Quint),
Clytie Jessop (Miss Mary Jessel), Eric Woodburn (Coachman), Isla Cameron (Anna). CinemaScope_
Twentieth-Century Fox/Achilles, bw, 99 mins., 1961.
The Turn of the Screw (U.S.; TV). Teleplay by William F. Nolan. Dir. Dan Curtis. Photog. Colin Callow. Music by Robert Cobert. Ed. Bill Breashers, Gary Anderson. Perf. Lynn Redgrave (Jane Cub-
berly/Governess), Jasper Jacob (Miles), James Laurenson (Peter Quint), Eva Griffith (Flora), Megs
Jenkins (Mrs. Grose), Kathryn Leigh Schott (Miss Jessel), Benedict Taylor (Timothy), John Baron
(Fredericks), Vivian Bennet (Secretary). Dan Curtis Productions, two-part series, color, 118 mins.,
1974. Videocassette. MPI Home Video, 1992. LC.
The Nightcomers (U.S.). A “prequel” to James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” focusing on Quint and Jessel’s relationship. Screenplay by Michael Hastings. Dir. Michael Winner. Photog. Robert Paynter. Music
by Jerry Fielding. Perf. Marlon Brando (Peter Quint), Stephanie Beachum (Miss Margaret Jessel),
Thora Hird (Mrs. Grose), Verna Harvey (Flora), Christopher Ellis (Miles), Harry Andrews (Master
of the House), Anna Palk (New Governess). Scimitar/AE, Technicolor, 96 mins., 1971. LC.
