The Turn of the Screw, Henry James - C. Knight Aldrich (essay date 1967)
C. Knight Aldrich (essay date 1967)
SOURCE: “Another Twist to The Turn of the Screw,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. XIII, No. 2, Summer, 1967, pp. 167–78.
[In the following essay, Aldrich supports the hallucination theory of James's novella and proposes that Mrs. Grose encourages the governess's visions.]
The question whether The Turn of the Screw is a ghost story or a psychiatric case history will probably never be answered to everyone's satisfaction. There is enough evidence to convince proponents of either side of the controversy, and I suspect that it is not so much the evidence as the predilection of the proponent that determines his choice. The imaginative soul who can rise above the mundane restrictions of everyday experience will find it easier to accept Peter Quint and Miss Jessel as ghosts; the more literal and earthbound will search for an explanation in psychopathology. James never completely committed...
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