Criticism > Short Story Criticism > The Turn of the Screw, Henry James - Robert Emmet Whelan (essay date 1988)

The Turn of the Screw, Henry James - Robert Emmet Whelan (essay date 1988)

Robert Emmet Whelan (essay date 1988)

SOURCE: “Ordinary Human Virtue: the Key to The Turn of the Screw,” in Renascence, Vol. 40, No. 3, Spring, 1988, p. 247–67.

[In the following essay, Whelan explores the governess's profound moral and spiritual crisis, maintaining that the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel mirror the evil tendencies within the children and the governess.]

“My hovering prowling presences, my pair of abnormal agents,” with their “dire duty of causing the situation to reek with the air of Evil,” is how Henry James describes the roles of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. There is no doubt that James intends to “bring the bad dead back to life for a second round of badness,” and wishes to make these evil ones, “the haunting pair, capable … of everything—that is of exerting, in respect to the children, the very worst action small victims so conditioned might be conceived as subject to” (xxi)....

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