Criticism > Short Story Criticism > The Turn of the Screw, Henry James - Stanley Renner (essay date 1988)

The Turn of the Screw, Henry James - Stanley Renner (essay date 1988)

Stanley Renner (essay date 1988)

SOURCE: “Sexual Hysteria, Physiognomical Bogeymen, and the ‘Ghosts’ in The Turn of the Screw,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 43, No. 2, September, 1988, pp. 175–94.

[In the following essay, Renner attributes the governess's detailed description of Peter Quint to nineteenth-century beliefs about the symptomatology of female sexual hysteria.]

For readers and critics for whom the true—and clearly the richer—story of James's The Turn of the Screw is its dramatization of a woman's psychosexual problem and the damage it does to the children in her charge, the immovable stumbling block has always been the governess's detailed description of Peter Quint, a man dead and buried whom she has never seen. If James does not mean for readers to take Quint (and subsequently Miss Jessel) as a bona fide ghost, so the argument runs, why does he arrange things so that the only way to...

[The entire page is 7940 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass