Summary

Ghost stories would appear at first not to be James’s natural genre, but like all of his mature fiction, The Turn of the Screw exhibits important complications. The tale is framed by a nameless narrator relating how one evening a man identified only as Douglas read a manuscript—which is the story one is about to read—to an audience eager to hear a ghost story. From the outset, then, the story is placed at several removes from the reader. Questions about Douglas, the narrator, and the authorship of the manuscript all remain maddeningly unresolved. It is also futile to attempt to resolve the question of whether the ghosts in the story are real.

The tale is simple enough in outline. The nameless governess has been hired by her similarly nameless employer to look after his orphaned nephew and niece, Miles and Flora. Sent down to Bly, the employer’s country house, for this purpose, the governess encounters two ghosts: that of Peter Quint, her employer’s dead former valet, and Miss Jessel, her predecessor as the children’s governess. From the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, the governess learns that Quint and Miss Jessel were intimate and that they may have corrupted the children.

In a series of bizarre incidents, the governess becomes convinced that the ghosts have indeed possessed the children, and she resolves to protect her charges from further harm by keeping them there at Bly, under her watchful eye. (Miles was to have returned to school, having been expelled earlier for possibly immoral conduct.) Her vigilance fails, however, as Flora is...