In the prelude to the main story in The Turn of the Screw, there are a few lines describing the manuscript which contains this story: it had stayed locked in a drawer in a London apartment for several years. It had been given to the presenter of the tale by a woman who had died twenty years before. It was ‘in old and faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand.’

This admission, perhaps unwitting, of the antiquity of the text should be regarded carefully, for it is this very oldness of a narrative which has not yet been narrated, but one which has just made its appearance in a close-knit circle of friends gathered by the fire on Christmas Eve, that may prove to be the crucial fact whose suppression makes it possible for The Turn of the Screw to distinguish between people and ghosts in the way it does.

At first sight, The Turn of the Screw seems already to be a travesty of the traditional ghost story. The inner story, narrated by the governess, explodes the naive scheme of the traditional story where the ghost is truly an apparition, meaning that its appearance is truly a sudden and unprecedented occurrence. In The Turn of the Screw, this age-worn device is first posited as the ghosts make their appearance on an apparently unbroken background of the children’s angelic behaviour and the community’s general sense of mutual trust and goodwill. But then this is problematised, and finally shown to be too simplistic by the dawning knowledge that the little boy Miles had been expelled from school for an unspecified misbehaviour, that both children were always already aware of the presence of the ghosts, and had probably also formed a devilish entente with them.

It should be noted how, at this point in the logic of the narrative, ‘appearances’ turn into ‘presences’, no longer surprising and unforeseen, but accepted as being already present in the scheme of things, polluting innocence at its very origin and turning all apparent virtue into vicious dissembling. The focus of fear shifts from the ghosts to the children’s awareness of the ghosts. The traditional scheme of the ghost story, which makes much of the spectre’s manifestation is thus unworked in The Turn of the Screw, which finds the sudden appearance to be an illusion, since the ghost had never been absent in the first place.

But the text fails, purposely perhaps, to carry to its logical end the argument it has initiated. The consequences of the always-already-present-ness of the ghosts are not fully explored, and it is only through a suppression of this fact that it becomes possible for the story to be narrated at all. Had the novel been true to its purpose, it would have become impossible for it to differentiate between people and ghosts. We shall see how the uneven application of arbitrary criteria constructs the ghostliness of the ghosts and how, to do this, the text places the abovementioned incomplete deconstruction at its centre, makes it the pivotal realisation around which the action turns.

After the governess, who is the narrator of the inner story, has found out about the children’s secret compact with the ghosts, the rest of the story is mainly about the different ways in which she tries to redeem them from the clutch of the horror, and her various states of hope and frustration in the quest to do so. Thus attention is drawn to this primary unworking. It is exhibited overtly as the central motive of the plot. It is given the status of an open trial where the naive traditional ghost story, dealing in straightforward appearances and vanishings, is found guilty of criminal simplicity and sentenced to terminal complications.

But by making this deconstruction its own governing principle, the origin and telos of its metaphysics, The Turn of the Screw begins to contradict this interpretative strategy itself. The text hints that the ghosts are not alien and intruding entities at all, but had been there all along. Yet it insists on keeping up the tropes and images which indicate them to be unwelcome and trespassing figures. After having realised their status as her precursors, our narrator the governess still tries to exorcise their ‘evil’ presence from the house. As she chronicles her experience, she is actually constructing her ideal text, trying to rewrite the tissue of events in order to create a narrative in which her position would be justified, her presence beyond question, and her actions absolutely honourable and above board. In her version of the story, she is the stereotypical good governess who must save her wards from evil influence.

It is significant that at the time of her first encounter with the ghostly Miss Jessel in chapter 6, we find her sewing something. Her attention is centred on the piece of cloth while she perceives the intrusion of a new presence on the border of her cognition. She regards this appearance with her peripheral vision while continuing with her work, though this work is now very disturbed.

The word ‘text’, as we know, comes from the Latin noun textus – fabric, and ultimately from the verb texere – to weave. In this image of sewing, therefore, we find an image of the governess shaping her own text, organising the script to her satisfaction when she is disturbed by Miss Jessel’s appearance on the periphery. However, by centering her attention absolutely on her textile endeavours, she is able to construct for it a permanently peripheral status.

At the first appearance of Peter Quint, too, something similar happens. The introduction of a foreign element in the semiotic field of her narrative disturbs the fine balance of her textual scheme. The fabric has to be woven anew in order to accommodate this presence, and the surrounding semantic field would suffer a consequent truncation of scope.

This phenomenon has many parallels in the history of any language. For example, the word ‘ghost’ itself, being of Germanic origin, suffered a shortening, a truncation, a severe limitation, in short a death, in the English language with the introduction into its semantic field of the Latinate word ‘spirit’, which took over almost the whole range of the older word’s religious denotations, except in such stray phrases and idioms like ‘the Holy Ghost’, ‘to give up the ghost’, etc. In German, however, the word has not suffered any such death, and Geist is still used to mean both the spook and the spirit. The English ‘ghost’, then, one could say, is the ghost of the German Geist.

No wonder, then, that at Quint’s first appearance ‘all the rest of the scene’ seems to the governess to be ‘stricken with death’. ‘The sounds of the evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing’ and ‘the friendly hour lost ... all its voice.’ (Chapter 3) An alien signifier has entered her text; she must remove it by rewriting it to the fringes of the story. ‘I saw him’, she admits, ‘as I see the letters I form on this page.’ (Chapter 3)

Neither is it surprising that her text perpetually looks at Quint and Miss Jessel as intruding and trespassing entities in spite of the established fact that they pre-existed her at Bly. The sense is somehow kept up that they are the unwanted strangers and she the insider, though the facts clearly indicate this to be incorrect. We are told that the ghostly couple continues to appear suddenly at odd corners, upsetting neat arrangements, no matter whether they were always already present or not. Thus the trope of the sudden intrusion of evil on an originally innocent and peaceful background is kept alive even after it has been found to be patently false.

The governess’s technique of constructing other people with the language of her intended text is made explicit by the way she appeals to intuitive knowledge whenever questioned in her thesis. ‘But how do you know?’ is a question we find Mrs. Grose asking her often. And the habitual way in which she responds is: ‘I know, I know, I know, and you know, my dear.’ (Chapter 6) This is the kind of hypnotic suggestion that gradually leads the simple Mrs. Grose to take for granted the ghostliness of the presences.

It is also possible to think of this anomaly in a grammatical way.

The usual kind of image with which the text emphasises the ghosts’ intrusiveness is the one where Quint is standing outside the dining room window and pressing his nose against the glass pane to look into the house. Though they appear once or twice inside the house, the text usually has them showing up at fringes and edges and generally being defined in topographical opposition to the ‘I’, the personal pronoun through which the governess speaks. Being the first person narrator, she is naturally always at the centre of her text, while the ghosts hover around the margins.

It should not be wrong to say, then, that the ‘I’, supposedly representing the sane, unified and truthful figure of the governess, is also defined in opposition mainly to the ghosts, who are the ultimate other for her, being topographically and ontologically the farthest removed from her normal self. Whatever else the ‘I’ is in The Turn of the Screw, it is certainly not any of the ghosts, for while the narrative voice is at the centre of the story, writing the text, the ghosts are at the fringe, being written.

But the problem with the pronoun ‘I’ is that one never knows where one is with it. It can stand for anybody at all, since everybody calls himself or herself by that name. Except in a relatively small number of sentences in The Turn of the Screw where the identity of the subject is stabilised by external devices, can one really be sure that the governess is the continuous, unbroken and only narrator of the story?

When the ghosts are present on the scene, all is well, for then the ‘I’ can be defined against their presence via negativa, as it were. The ghosts are out there, so the narrative voice is obviously something else; it is the voice of our governess. But in their absence, we can seldom be sure whose voice we are listening to.

It has already been established by the text itself that the ghosts have always been present in the scheme of things. There are moments, however, when they are not present on the scene or are not being directly discussed. So where are they when they are not occupying their assigned posts on the periphery of the text? To be at once present and invisible, they can only be at a spot that is not subject to the centre's contemplation, that is, at the centre itself. Whenever the ghosts are not visible near the margins, is it possible that they are actually invading the centre? In the innocuous passages where no ghost is apparent, is one always sure that it is the governess who is speaking to the reader? The signified narrator slips away under the innocent signifier ‘I’, and a ghostly narrator, with nothing on the margins to confirm its identity against, puts on the garb of storyteller. The governess becomes at least as ghostly as Quint or Miss Jessel, and her presence as suspect as theirs.

It will be noticed here that regarding Quint and Miss Jessel there is a plethora of objective details with which to establish their identities, while regarding the governess we have extremely few. We also have it on the narrator’s authority that in general Quint does not look like a gentleman. We know about his dress, his relationship with his former employer, with his fellow employees and so forth.

Common sense tells us that this ‘ghost’ Quint is much more a creature of daylight and clarity than the governess, about whom we know nothing except that she is the daughter of a country parson. And even that knowledge one has to derive from the framing narrative. Even Miss Jessel, who is much less specified than Quint, has a name, which is more than can be said about our narrator. The governess is a shadowy, nameless creature whom we assume to be continuously under the problematic signifier ‘I’, and who still unreasonably insists that it is not she, but the much more solid figures of Quint and Jessel who are the ghosts.

Like the word ‘right’, which has no meaning without its opposite ‘left’, the narrator’s tenuous self has no credibility without solid support from the ghosts, which she usurps. Rather than the ghosts, it is her dexterity in sliding away beneath the personal pronoun that one finds sinister.

The text tries hard to suppress its own anxiety about its narrator’s identity by continually emphasising the supplementary nature of the ghosts. But this unconscious anxiety breaks surface at a number of points where the governess finds her role reversed with those of the ghosts. Back from church on a Sunday morning at the end of the Chapter 15, she finds Miss Jessel seated at her table. She is disturbed by the fact that in spite of her entrance, the ghost’s tired, leaning attitude has persisted. She recognises the ghost as her ‘vile predecessor’ who was ‘dishonoured and tragic’. ‘She had looked at me long enough’, writes the governess, ‘to appear to say that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers. While these instants lasted indeed I had the extraordinary chill of a feeling that it was I who was the intruder. It was as a wild protest against it that, actually addressing her – "you terrible, miserable woman!" – I heard myself break into a sound that, by the open door, ran through the long passage and the empty house.’

But protest wildly as she might, there is no denying the fact that the motif of sudden appearance on an unbroken background is far more eminently applicable to herself than to Quint and Miss Jessel, she being the latest arrival at Bly house. It is her violent assertions and textual thread-pulling that make the case appear to be the other way round.

A similar thing happens in chapter 10, when she looks out through a window one night, afraid that the little boy Miles might be out there on a secret meeting with the ghostly Quint. She finds him standing on the lawn, staring not at the overgrown farther periphery of the estate where she would like the ghost to be, but right back at the house where she herself stood. This puzzles her; she can make no sense of this inversion. The episode refuses to fit into her text. She fails to recognise that instead of writing the event into its neat textual pigeonhole, she is now herself being written by the text. Her favourite trope, depending on the opposition ‘inside/outside’ is deftly reversed, and she finds the centrality and interiority of her experience being sent out towards the margins. In the tissue of events at Bly, which already contains Quint and Miss Jessel, she is the unprecedented, disrupting, sudden and ghostly entity that the text is perpetually trying to expel or marginalise. She is being written into a ghost by the text of which, she fondly believes, she is the writer.

The best of all is the episode in chapter 4, where she goes round outside the dining room’s window and stands at the position from where Quint has vanished a minute before. ‘It was confusedly present to me that I ought to present myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room.’ At this moment Mrs. Grose enters the room and turns pale at the sight of her. Bewildered, the narrator says, ‘I wondered why she should be scared.’

Who is this talking to us? Who is the nameless being that confides in us in the guise of the simple letter ‘I’? Is it the governess imitating the ghost’s action or the ghost imitating her voice? Is it our governess or is it a puzzled ghost that wonders how, after having been around all along, it is now suddenly being marginalised by an upstart arrival who has even taught Mrs. Grose to be afraid of it?

This same image of the antiquity of the text that refuses to be rewritten is important in the outer narrative, too. There too we find a text, which, by pre-existing the characters, frustrates their presumptuous attempts to rewrite it.

The image of the sudden and intrusive appearance is repeated in this shell story. Much show is made regarding how the manuscript containing the story is sent for by post, how it arrives two days later, and shows up in a close circle of friends that has already been in session for some time. So it is the inner text here that is seen as the intruder, the new appearance on a background of intimate and friendly discourse. But this pretension is again belied by the admission regarding the antiquity of the text, quoted at the beginning of this paper, which is the unconscious awareness of the shell narrator that instead of being able to rewrite the text, he will himself be pre-existed and rewritten by it to become a ghostly presence on the fringes of The Turn of the Screw.

How many of us, one wonders, can recall the existence of the first-person narrator in the capsular narrative of The Turn of the Screw? There is almost nothing to remember him by. Again a shadowy figure under the first person pronoun, this still ghostlier narrator has, in addition to no name, also no gender and not even a country parson to vouch for his parentage.

Yet this airy wisp of nothingness steadfastly asserts that it is she – which gendered word is being used merely for convenience – who is writing the text. ‘Let me say here distinctly’, she writes, ‘to have done with it, that this little narrative from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall presently give.’ A feeble attempt is made to sketch in the hint of a background and a history through the narrator’s exchanges with Douglas, who is a fellow apparition at least blessed with a name. But matched for solidity, the narrative beats its narrator hands down, since it occupies the rest of the book called The Turn of the Screw. The narrator would write a ghost story, but is instead written away, along with friends and relations, to a spectral limbo by the solidity and the antiquity of the text.

A Note: Henry James was an American most of his life, born in New York City in 1843, the son of another Henry James (1811 - 1882), who is known for his idiosyncratic espousal of Swedenborgianism, and the brother of William James, the noted psychologist and pragmatic philosopher. The family was financially well off, and James lived variously in Albany and NYC, and in Europe where he was educated by tutors, and by governesses such as the one in The Turn of the Screw. Lacking other formal education, he read widely, primarily fiction. An accident at the beginning of the Civil War, producing what he called an ‘obscure hurt’, kept him out of the conflict, and he began writing fiction. By 1868, he was being called ‘the best writer of short stories in America’, and he had become a close friend of William Dean Howells, then an editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Between them, these two writers ushered ‘realism’ into American literature.

From 1869 on, James spent increasing amounts of time in Europe, and many of his later stories and novels reflect his European sympathies and experiences. In the last year or so of his life, he became a British citizen; he died in London in 1916. Altogether, he wrote some twenty full-length novels, a dozen novelettes (‘the beautiful and blest nouvelleà the ideal form for fiction’), more than one hundred short stories, and a number of essays, including some on the drama, a form to which he aspired but in which he never achieved. In the years 1907 - 1909, his works were collected in twenty-four volumes as the ‘New York Edition’. For these volumes James wrote a series of prefaces which, in their collected form, amount to a major text on the art of fiction. The aspiring writer can do worse than to master these prefaces and the points made therein.

Adapted from the Introduction by Clarence A. Andrews to the Airmont Classics edition (pub. 1967) of The Turn of the Screw.