The Turn of the Screw 619from a plainer background, but she is the salt of the
earth and knows her place in society. She also passes
from innocence to experience. Though the guard-
ian and children of Bly are Americans of privilege,
they parallel James’s ‘civilized’ Europeans. Thus, they
have a taint of corruption due to their class, and it is
not surprising that the children may be acquainted
with wickedness.
Flora and Miles are different from James’s
typical innocents. They are not strangers to a culture
who might commit a social error; instead, they are so
“beautiful,” “lovely,” “angelic,” “with charming little
‘table manners’ ” that even Miles’s unnamed actions
at school are minimized by the governess and Mrs.
Grose as the healthy “naughtiness” of a little boy.
What, then, is the wickedness or corruption of
which they are accused?
If the story is read as supernatural, then Quint
and Miss Jessel are ghosts who were evildoers in
their lives. The governess believes the children see
the apparitions, although they never say they do.
She thinks they have been initiated into dangerous,
probably sexual, knowledge. In chapter 6, Flora and
the governess are sitting at the lakeside. Suddenly,
the governess sees on the opposite bank, “a figure
of . . . horror and evil: a woman in black, pale and
dreadful.” Flora’s back is to the figure, and she is
sticking a twig into a piece of wood with a hole in it,
perhaps to make a toy boat. The governess watches
her “attempting to tighten” the twig into place.
The governess says she “apprehended” what Flora
was doing, but does not specify. Is Flora simply a
child at play, or is she making a boat as a sign that
she wants to join Miss Jessel in death? Perhaps her
actions illustrate sexual intercourse. In the latter two
choices, the child is damaged if not damned, which
is why the governess believes she must save Flora
from crossing over to the other side. Later, after
a second appearance of Miss Jessel, Flora denies
ever having seen her, turns in terror of the present
governess, holds onto Mrs. Grose for protection,
and soon falls ill. When the housekeeper reports
to the governess the next day, she says, “From that
child—horrors! . . . she says things—!” The govern-
ess feels justified in her suspicions. Flora must be
taken away from Bly. Perhaps Flora will recover,
but she will not be innocent of the events that have
transpired. The governess is now alone in the house
with Miles.
In the final scene, the governess confronts Miles
about stealing her letter to the guardian about
Miles’s dismissal and Flora’s derangement. Quint
appears at the window, as if he has come to draw
Miles to his death. The governess blocks Miles’s
view of the window, forces him to admit stealing the
letter, and then presses him to reveal what he did at
school. He tells her he has said things to other chil-
dren that he liked. He realizes that she is preventing
him from seeing the window. He asks if Miss Jessel
is there. The governess tells him it is Quint. Miles
struggles to see the valet, seems to fall, and the gov-
erness grabs him, as if to protect his soul from being
taken by Quint. When she rises, Miles is dead, “his
little heart dispossessed.” The last word is ambigu-
ous: Either the governess has won Miles’s soul and
he is no longer possessed by a demon or, literally,
his heart has simply stopped and she has scared an
innocent to death.
If the story is read as a psychological tale, then
the children are innocent from beginning to end.
Obsessed with the tryst between Miss Jessel and
Quint, stimulated by her infatuation for the guard-
ian, the mad governess is the source of evil who sees
sexual meaning in all the acts of the children. In the
end, she destroys the two to keep them from becom-
ing normal, sexualized adults.
Ellen RosenbergiSolation in The Turn of the Screw
The theme of isolation manifests itself throughout
The Turn of the Screw. The setting of the story is
a lonely countryside house, far from neighboring
homes. While the governess’s first impression of Bly
is of an open, fresh-looking estate with lawns, bright
flowers, and twittering birds, within a day she feels
fearful of its remoteness and size. By the end of the
first chapter, she thinks that the little household is “as
lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship.”
She senses something ominous stirring in the breath
of the house, and is soon keeping a written account
of “what was hideous at Bly,” which she now experi-
ences as a great emptiness. If the house is physically
isolated, it is also cut off from civilization in time as
well; the books in the library are a century old.