Gullible Governesses, Gothic Manors, and Ghosts

The Turn of Screw still giving the chills more than hundred years later. If there was ever an award for a book that builds fear just by its atmospheric set up, then Turn of the Screw would be a strong contender.

Old Country house manor -check. Angelic, golden haired, creepy children- check. Conspiring servants – check. Floating shadows – check. Unhinged potentially misunderstood heroine – check.

The Turn of the Screw fulfills all the horror tropes; in fact, I wonder if this is where tropes come from. So what makes this hundred page novella, such a classic?

(Note – This review is full of spoilers but if a book is over 200 years old, does it even matter?)

Courtesy: Unsplash

Nothing Is as It Seems.

A young governess has been hired by a charming young man to look his orphaned niece and nephew at his country mansion.  He puts only one condition to her employment- he must never ever be troubled with any of their concerns. The governess eager to please her handsome employer, agrees to this and heads off to Bly, a seemingly pleasant and harmless country house (we shall see!)

She is introduced to Flora, the younger of the two children placed in her care. Flora is a beautiful, angelic perfect child. So perfect that its unnerving. Every interaction with Flora rises off the page as a sinister conspiracy. A sense of impending doom permeates the writing. Sure enough, the governess soon sees a ghost of a man she later learns was master’s valet. This man was rumored to be in an illicit relationship with previous governess of the manor (gasp!)!

Ah, the plot thickens!

Her heroine is only mildly freaked out for her and Flora’s safety, when the second child arrives home from boarding school. Miles is even more angelic and perfect even though he has been expelled from school for undisclosed reasons.

On a boating expedition with the kids, another supernatural incident occurs. This pushes the governess over the edge, and she is convinced that the dead and the children are colluding to drive her mad.

“There was something between them.”
“There was everything.”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

While nothing is ever made apparent, there is a lot of suggestion to the ‘nature’ of the relationship between children and the dead couple that is haunting them.

The plot loosely dabbles with religious themes, corruption of souls, sexual abuse and the meaning of sanity itself. The fact that there are more questions than answers, add to this palpable uncertainty and horror to the events that follow to the end.

The Story Within the Story

“No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!”
― Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

Essays have been written about the structural ambiguity of the plot itself. The story is narrated by a young gentleman in front of a country house’s weekend gathering. He reads from the notes of a young governess; our protagonist, who remains unnamed throughout the tale.

This secondhand narration already puts in doubt what happens. The events at Bly rely completely on what the governess tells us, and she herself has no knowledge of things that have already transpired before she arrived there.

So, do we trust her version of things?  The inner workings of her mind, her rantings and ravings lead us to further doubt her sanity itself – and our sympathy fluctuates between her and the children. With an unreliable narrator, there is no frame of reference and one feels both exasperation and terror as the plot unfolds.

It’s not clear if Henry James intended to write anything more than a simple ghost story, but the specter of the dead valet and his lover, the angelic children and terrified governess stay with us long after the pages of the books are closed.

For more to read in the month of Halloween, check these chilling reads out.