" . . . one of [James's] most cruel effects: the ambiguity of innocence, of an innocence which is pure of the evil it contains; the art of perfect dissimulation which enables the children to conceal this evil from the honest folk amongst whom they live, an evil which is perhaps an innocence that becomes evil in the proximity of such folk, the incorruptible innocence they oppose to the true evil of adults; or again the riddle of the visions attributed to them, the uncertainty of a story which has perhaps been foisted upon them by the demented imagination of a governess who tortures them to death with her own hallucinations." --Maurice Blanchot (from The Siren's Song: Selected Essays by Maurice Blanchot; rpt from a 1959 essay)
"There is no question that the young woman sees the ghosts of Peter Quint and of Miss Jessel. We recognize also that she is making an extraordinary effort to keep calm in the face of the evil she fears. The evil, however, is in her own mind; when she has the 'certitude' that her ghosts have come for the children, the reader must decide whether she is stating a fact or enunciating a theory. Looking back over her story, we discover that her circumstantial account of the behavior of the children establishes them as 'normal.' Little Miles wants to know when he is going back to school; little Flora's escapade with the boar is perfectly in character for an eight-year-old. Yet the governess makes the behavior of the children seem sinister. The real 'turn of the screw'--the particular twist of pain in the tale--resides in what the governess is doing to the children. They, on their side, try constantly to accommodate themselves to her vision." --Leon Edel, from Henry James: Stories of the Supernatural
"Only make the reader's general vision of evil intense enough . . . and his own experience, his own imagination . . will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications." --Henry James
"The Turn of the Screw is the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature, ancient of modern. how Mr. James could, or how any man or woman could, choose to make such a study of infernal human debauchery, for it is nothing else, is unaccountable. . . . The study, while it exhibits Mr. James's genius in a powerful light, affects the reader with a disgust that is not to be expressed. The feeling after perusal of the horrible story is that one has been assisting in an outrage upon the holiest and sweetest fountain of human innocence, and helping to debauch--at least by helplessly standing by--the pure and trusting nature of children. Human imagination can go no further into infamy, literary art could not be used with more refined subtlety of spiritual defilement." --The Independent, 1899
"In 1934, Edmund Wilson for the first time suggests explicitly that The Turn of the Screw is not, in fact, a ghost story but a madness story, a study of a case of neurosis: the ghosts, accordingly, do not really exist; they are but figments of the governess's sick imagination, mere hallucinations and projections symptomatic of the frustration of her repressed sexual desires. This psychoanalytic interpretation will hit the critical scene like a bomb. Making its author into an overnight celebrity by arousing as much interest as James's text itself, Wilson's article will provoke a veritable barrage of indignant refutations, all closely argued and based on 'irrefutable' textual evidence." --Shoshana Felman, "Madness and the Risks of Practice (Turning the Screw of Interpretation)"
"Henry James's ghosts have nothing in common with the violent old ghosts__the blood-stained sea captains, the white horses, the headless ladies of dark lanes and windy commons. They have their origin within us. They are present whenever the significant overflows our powers of expressing it; whenever the ordinary appears ringed by the strange. The baffling things that are left over, the frightening ones that persist--these are the emotions that he takes, embodies, makes consoling and companionable. But how can we be afraid? . . . The beautiful urbane spirits are only not of this world because they are too fine for it. . . . We may feel clumsy in their presence, but we cannot feel afraid. What doe sit matter, then, if we do pick up 'The Turn of the Screw' an hour or so before bedtime?. . .
Perhaps it is the silence that first impresses us. . . . 'I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the gold sky, and the friendly hour lost for the unspeakable minute all its voice.' It is unspeakable. We know that the man who sands on the tower staring down at the governess beneath is evil. Some unutterable obscenity has come to the surface. It tries to get i; it tries to get at something. The exquisite little beings who lie innocently asleep must at all costs be protected. But the horror grows. Is it possible that the little girl, as she turns back from the window, has seen the woman outside? Has she been with Miss Jessel? Has Quint visited the boy? It is Quint who hangs about us in the dark; who is there in that corner and again there in that. It is Quint who must be reasoned away, and for all our reasoning returns. Can it be that we are afraid? But it is not a man with red hair and a white face whom we fear. We are afraid of something unnamed, of something, perhaps, in ourselves. In short, we turn on the light. If by its beams we examine the story in safety, note how masterly the telling is, how each sentence is stretched, each image filled, how the inner world gains from the robustness of the outer, how beauty and obscenity twined together worm their way to the depths--still we must own that something remains unaccounted for. We must admit that Henry James has conquered. That courtly, worldly, sentimental old gentleman can still make us afraid of the dark. --Virginia Woolf, "Henry James's Ghost Stories," 1921.
