Criticism > Short Story Criticism > The Turn of the Screw, Henry James - John Lydenberg (essay date 1957)

The Turn of the Screw, Henry James - John Lydenberg (essay date 1957)

John Lydenberg (essay date 1957)

SOURCE: “The Governess Turns the Screws,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 12, No. 1, June, 1957, pp. 37–58.

[In the following essay, Lydenberg perceives the governess as an ironic savior who causes the breakdown of Flora and the death of Miles.]

The interpretation of The Turn of the Screw made by Edmund Wilson in the thirties is today a dead horse, oft beaten. Every reader of the exegeses of Henry James's most famous ghost story must by now be convinced that James did not intend it as an account of the hallucinations of a frustrated, sex-starved governess.

At present it is the fashion to read the story not as a Freudian analysis but as Christian myth, suggestive of “archetypal” religious experiences. Robert W. Heilman has given the fullest exposition of this symbolic interpretation in “The Turn of the Screw as Poem,”1 an essay as typical of late forties'...

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