SOURCE: “Exposure in The Turn of the Screw,” in Modern Philology, Vol. 78, No. 3, February, 1981, pp. 261-74.

[In the following essay, Schrero contends that The Turn of the Screw should be analyzed in terms of various cultural beliefs and traditions common to the Victorian era—particularly the interactions between children, parents, servants, and governesses.]

Few critics since 1925 have responded to The Turn of the Screw as its first reviewers did in 1898. Edna Kenton's 1925 essay, which was to be amplified by Edmund Wilson's three versions of “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” foreshadowed a series of ironic readings that have swelled into the mainstream of interpretation. In 1898, however, the story seemed only too clear, for reviewers complained about its horrors and confessed to being frightened by them.¹ As late as 1916, William Lyon Phelps saw in the tale “the connoting strength of its author's reticence,” which made his meaning sufficiently clear. And for Phelps, as for the first reviewers, this meaning was spine chilling; it was also “profoundly ethical, making to all those who are interested in the moral welfare of boys and girls an appeal simply terrific in its intensity.” Such views stand in contrast to late twentieth-century readings of The Turn of the Screw which trace multiple and contradictory meanings in it rather than the image of a moral condition.²

What accounts for this shift in critical interest? I shall argue that, aside from the growing influence of psychoanalysis after the First World War, and, after the second, a general preoccupation with interpretation, the cause lies in the opacity of certain references in the tale—references formerly transparent but now darkened by cultural change. According to this hypothesis, James meant to show the hapless case of two abandoned orphans, not the fate of reading; and he had grounds for expecting his readers to understand the children's case as paradigmatic for civilization. For James and his contemporaries, as I hope to demonstrate, specific cultural allegiances controlled the play of textual meaning. Entwined with these allegiances were traditions about four familial and social roles whose interrelations form a center of interest in the tale: the roles of parents, servants, governesses, and children. When these are considered within a Victorian frame of reference, I shall argue, James's tale loses much of the ambiguity that has preoccupied critics since the mid-1930s; it acquires the nightmarish aspect that Victorian readers found in it. This aspect, moreover, cannot be explained by an appeal to the merely ghostly.

I

Three features of the preamble to the governess's narrative hint at the Victorian frame of reference. The first is Douglas's insistence that “the narrative … really required for a proper intelligence a few words of prologue” (p. 4). The importance of the prologue is reinforced by a second feature, Douglas's delay in reading aloud the manuscript arrived from London on the third day of the frame-story. He does not begin to read until the fourth night, when, by the departure of certain ladies, his “little final auditory” was “made … more compact and select … subject to a common thrill” (ibid.). The prologue, or at least crucial parts of it, he reserves for the third night; and these preliminaries, at one point, prompt a sharp question. This, the most revealing hint of the three, comes as Douglas is summarizing various explanations given to the young governess-to-be by Miles's and Flora's uncle: “There had been for the two children at first a young lady whom they had had the misfortune to lose. She had done for them quite beautifully—she was a most respectable person—till her death. … Mrs. Grose, since then, in the way of manners and things, had done as she could for Flora; and there were, further, a cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old pony, an old groom and an old gardener, all likewise thoroughly respectable” (p. 5).

Here someone asks, “‘And what did the former governess die of? Of so much respectability?’” The sarcasm, plainly, is a response to Douglas's stress on the household's respectability, embracing even the pony. His irony and, no doubt, his vocal tone invite the question, which completes an exchange of innuendoes. Among these, we shall see, is the observation that the uncle has abandoned Miles and Flora; that, even worse, he has placed them in the hands of persons unfit. He has done what James Mark Baldwin, in the year Henry James noted down the germ of his tale, warned fathers against doing: he has allowed the children's “mental growth, the formation of their characters, the evolution of their personality, to go on by absorption—if no worse—from common, vulgar, imported and changing, often immoral, attendants!”³

Baldwin's warning was no innovation; on the contrary, it took up an old refrain. For at least a century conventional wisdom had held that servants were corrupters of children. This conviction has a bearing on The Turn of the Screw because of the dominant role of the servant Peter Quint in the household at Bly. “‘The master believed in him and placed him here,’” Mrs. Grose tells the young governess. “‘So he had everything to say. Yes’—she let me have it—‘even about them [the children]’” (p. 27). Douglas's prologue presumes standard attitudes toward servants and the hazards they presented to the moral welfare of children. In all likelihood, as will appear, these are the hazards James meant when he wrote to an inquiring correspondent: “The thing … I most wanted not to fail of doing … was to give the impression of the communication to the children of the most infernal imaginable evil and danger—the condition, on their part, of being as exposed as we can humanly conceive children to be.”⁴

The exposure of the children, indeed their victimization because of their uncle's neglect, as Victorians saw it, can be appreciated if one considers what had long been said about servants' contacts with children. As far back as The Parent's Assistant, Maria Edgeworth's collection of children's tales, it was already traditional to regard servants as likely corrupters of the young. Addressing parents in a preface, Miss Edgeworth pointed out several lessons taught by her tales. In “The Birthday Present,” she said, one sees “the dangers which may arise in education from a bad servant.”⁵ The tale bears out this claim. A spoiled little girl, Bell, is overindulged by her mother and is thrown much in the company of Nancy, “the maid who educated her,” as the text remarks in italics. Bell, it appears, “had learned from her maid a total disregard of truth,” evident in Bell's deceitful behavior.⁶

Corruption by servants received still greater emphasis in the work on education that Miss Edgeworth wrote with her father. Their Practical Education, published in 1798 and several times reprinted, recommends that children be isolated from servants. There should be no conversation between them. Parents “should be absolutely strict in this particular,” and should discharge servants who break the rule. “It may be feared that some secret intercourse should be carried on between children and servants; but this will be lessened by the arrangements in the house which we have mentioned, and by care in a mother or governess to know exactly where children are, and what they are doing every hour of the day. …”⁷

Of special interest is the Edgeworths' reiterated warning against secret contacts between servants and children. They remark that “where parents have not sufficient firmness to prevent the interference of acquaintance, and sufficient prudence to keep children from all clandestine communication with servants, we earnestly advise that the children be sent to some public seminary of education.”⁸ Without supposing that Henry James or his readers had looked into Practical Education, it is worth our notice because the warning it sounds was traditional and remained so.⁹

Evidence that the warning was traditional appears in the Edgeworths' remark that “all these things have been said a hundred times: and, what is more, they are universally acknowledged to be true.” In fact, “it has passed into a common maxim with all who reflect, and even with all who speak upon the subject of education, that “it is the worst thing in the world to leave children with servants.’”¹⁰ Corroboration of the tradition appears in a quarter where one might not expect it. Servants, wrote William Godwin, “will instruct us in the practice of cunning, and the arts of deceit. They will teach us to exhibit a studied countenance to those who preside over us. … They will make us confidants of their vices.”¹¹ (This exactly describes the influence ascribed by the young governess to Quint and his instrument Miss Jessel.) Godwin, like the Edgeworths, testifies to an entrenched disapproval of contacts between servants and children. “A resource frequently employed … is for parents to caution their offspring against the intercourse of menials, and explicitly tell them that the company of servants is by no means a suitable relaxation for the children of a family.”¹²

Later in the nineteenth century, the precepts of Godwin and the Edgeworths were echoed in widely read tales for children or adults. Mrs. Henry Sherwood's The History of the Fairchild Family (1818-47) is an example. It was standard fare for English children until about 1887, and although condemned for its Evangelical terrors, “was perhaps as widely read … as any English book ever written for children.”¹³ It was still thought suitable to be given as a prize book by a Church of England Sunday School in 1908.¹⁴ Although the fictive Mrs. Fairchild did not prohibit contacts with all servants, “she did not approve of [her young son's] going into the stable or offices amongst the lower men-servants and stable-boys, where he must hear much that was wrong.” She insists “that he should not wilfully hear what must hurt his mind, his morals, and his manners as a gentleman, and, above all, as a Christian.” “No gentleman by birth is a real gentleman,” she declares, if he “loves the stable-yard, and the company of uneducated grooms and keepers of dogs.”¹⁵ In one episode the Fairchild children learn how a child grew up to be a murderer because of a careless upbringing that “allowed [him] to be with the servants in the stable and kitchen.”¹⁶

And there were other echoes of what remained the conventional view in 1847. Anne Bronte's Agnes Grey, published in that year, presents Mrs. Bloomfield, the wife of a rich retired tradesman, instructing the heroine in her functions as governess: “Mary Ann … is a very good girl upon the whole: though I wish her to be kept out of the nursery as much as possible, as she is now almost six years old, and might acquire bad habits from the nurses. I have ordered her crib to be placed in your room, and if you will be so kind as to overlook her washing and dressing, and take charge of her clothes, she need have nothing further to do with the nursery maid.” Subsequently, in the home of the Murrays, who are gentry, the younger daughter Matilda must be forbidden the stables and “the companionship of the coachmen, grooms, horses, greyhounds, and pointers” because of the “roughness of her manners.”¹⁷

Servants and their corrupting influence continued to be viewed in much the same light up to the end of the century at least. The tradition continued in the Parent's Assistant and The Fairchild Family, both enduringly popular. As for the oral tradition mentioned by Godwin and the Edgeworths, there was little or nothing in Victorian life to weaken it. On the contrary, there was much to reinforce it in late-Victorian social and economic conditions.

Distrust of servants rose sharply in the late 1880s and early 1890s—so much, in fact, as to become a notorious topic for the reviews read in cultivated households. “To judge from the number of magazine articles which have of late appeared, touching more or less upon the subject,” one writer complained, “an unwonted interest is being taken in the domestic servant.” A recent piece by Lady Violet Greville was typical, he observed. It had treated the faults of menservants indulgently but disdainfully. The masters and mistresses of England, he continued, took the view that “servants are low, mean and degraded, but if there be maintained towards them a repressive attitude of haughty disdain, society will be preserved from contamination.”¹⁸ The author, himself a butler, conceded that servants' “reputation for meanness and general depravity is abundantly supported [by the daily papers and the registry offices],” and it “affords a fairly adequate criterion of [their] real worth.”¹⁹

The causes of this problem, he said, included something more than “the deterrent conditions which tend to eliminate the better class of men and women.” The evil was passed on from older servants to younger ones, whose elders were commonly “sensualists in a more or less advanced stage of degradation.” Responsibility for this lay with the employers. “Society is too much taken up with its balls and millinery, its dinners and matchmaking. … The care of servants is too often relegated to a butler or housekeeper more debauched than those over whom they have charge.”²⁰ Obviously, it was still worse to entrust children to the care of such persons; and the practice, as we have seen, was condemned by James Mark Baldwin. No doubt he also had in mind attendants who were nurses or governesses. The point is that the worry over immoral attendants persisted, and servants virtually by definition figured as immoral in late-Victorian eyes. There might be honorable exceptions (Mrs. Grose is one), but it was proper to act on the principle that servants were guilty until experience proved them innocent.

But how were children to be shielded from these corrupters; who was to relieve the parental burden of forming manners and morals? The solution was the one announced by Mrs. Bloomfield to Agnes Grey: it was the governess. It was she who took charge of girls from the age of six or seven until their coming out and of boys from about six or seven until they acquired a tutor or went off to a preparatory school at eight or nine. According to one Victorian authority, Sir George Stephen, the governess stood precisely in loco parentis; she was “to consider herself the delegate of the mother, such as she ought to be, rather than such as she is usually found.”²¹ Her authority included all questions of “moral and general tuition,” subject only to the control of the mother, whose commands, however, were to be resisted if ill-conceived.²²

Still, governesses also may have been suspect. Miss Jessel after all was a governess, and there had been earlier wicked governesses in fiction (as noted below). But, in regard to the antecedent probabilities for a late-Victorian reader, two points must be considered. First, Miss Jessel is the victim and instrument of Quint, who “‘did what he wished,’” says Mrs. Grose, “‘with them all’” (p. 33). In the first apparitional episode as in the final and climactic one, Quint is in the foreground. In the foreground, therefore, is an opposition between the traditional depravity of a bad servant and the moral allegiances of the governess-narrator. Moreover, the question about her—when, rarely and only temporarily, the earliest commentators had one—concerned not her virtue but her sanity. The second point to be raised, then, is whether Victorians viewed governesses as especially liable to madness.

II

Let it be said at once that madness was not a trait that most Victorians associated with governesses. This is clear despite the assertions of Lady Eastlake and Harriet Martineau, in 1848 and 1859-60, that governesses formed the most numerous class of female inmates in lunatic asylums.²³ Important discussions by medical authorities did not support this contention; neither did the statistics of mental patients in England and Wales, nor the reports of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution.²⁴ The informed view, which was expressed in Macmillan's Magazine by Daniel Hack Tuke, one of the foremost English alienists, was that governesses formed only a small part of the patient population. In both country and urban asylums, said Tuke, “are to be found a few governesses and teachers,” whereas farm laborers and their families in the former and “mechanics and artizans” in the latter were in the majority. It was, in fact, the laboring poor who were thought by the upper classes to be especially liable to madness, and Tuke took pains to dispel this notion.²⁵

Fictional governesses, also, were not commonly mad. Patricia Thomson identifies three main types of governess in fiction: the criminal, the rebellious, and the submissive.²⁶ As for real governesses, the prevailing opinion was that they might be worn down by slights and hardships over many years, might gradually become harsh, rigid, ailing, and ungenial—but not mad.²⁷

By the close of the century, and about the time that the reputation of servants was worse than ever, governesses were enjoying increased respect in households that were not philistine. Their “position in the house and the consideration with which they are treated … have immeasurably improved,” wrote Mary Maxe in the National Review. Governesses' social status, however, remained anomalous and often bred discontent. Sometimes, Maxe noted, “the discontent goes so deep, and so influences the attitude toward life, that the governess becomes an unhealthy companion to [her] pupils. … The tone of the schoolroom is morbid, trifles are exaggerated, and the girl gets her first view of the world through the eyes of a fretful and discontented woman.”²⁸

This is not madness, nor is it descriptive of the governess in The Turn of the Screw. Despite such “loss of geniality,” as John Duguid Milne called it, despite incompetence, ignorance, or lack of refinement in some governesses, A. W. Pollard in 1889 upheld the cause of “the average highly cultivated governess,” too often undervalued by her employers. Like Mary Maxe, he thought that the social position of governesses had improved. “Public opinion,” he said, “is on the side of the governess, and it is only the people who are inaccessible to public opinion by whom the governess is still regarded as a cypher or a butt. These, it is true, are still unhappily numerous.”²⁹

For readers holding such views, the governess-narrator in The Turn of the Screw would not have been especially a candidate for madness. On the contrary, her situation is the reverse of that usually cited by Victorians as the cause of governesses' ill health. She is young, not old. She lives in comfort on a delightful estate instead of in cramped, depressing quarters. She suffers neither physical privation nor social slights; rather, she enjoys the deference of all at Bly, where she is the only gentlewoman, vested with the master's authority. Her pupils are not dull or sullen, but beautiful, gifted, charming, and affectionate.³⁰ The only feature of her stay at Bly that belongs to the conventional hardships of governess life is the isolation of the household.

In 1898, what would have seemed important to respectable readers was her fitness to fulfill the role defined by Sir George Stephen: serving as “the delegate of the mother, such as she ought to be, rather than such as she is usually found.”³¹ This preeminently moral and feminine burden was weightier than any merely private responsibility. Ruskin's well-known lecture “Of Queen's Gardens” sets forth what was thought to be involved: woman was the high priestess who made Home a temple of the spirit and a shrine of civilization.³²

Implicit in this conception was the special responsibility of women for the moral training of the young. Samuel Smiles expressed the standard view in writing that “the happiness or misery, the enlightenment or ignorance, the civilisation or barbarism of the world, depends in a very high degree upon the exercise of woman's power within her special kingdom of home.” “Posterity,” he declared, “may be said to lie before us in the person of the child on the mother's lap,” for “woman cultivates the feelings, which mainly determine the character” and “it is chiefly through her that we are enabled to arrive at virtue.”³³ Implicated, therefore, in the function of a governess, as of a mother, was the fate of society.

Readers in 1898 did not have to be told what it meant for Miles and Flora to be deprived of a mother's care and left in the hands of servants. The uncle's remoteness has an obvious significance, underlined by his bland explanation that Mrs. Grose, “who had formerly been maid to his mother,” had been for some time superintending Flora “in the way of manners and things” (p. 5). (The insouciant phrase calls up a world of idlers, the Dolly Longstaffes and Sir Felix Carburys of Victorian London.) The uncle pretends to have kept the children with “the best people he could find to look after them, parting even with his own servants to wait on them”—the narrative irony in this is clear. He further says that he has visited the young pair whenever he could; unfortunately “his own affairs took up all his time”—these being, one gathers, exclusively consistent with “expensive habits … charming ways with women … the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase” (pp. 4-5).

When the uncle is said to make the claim that “he immensely pitied the poor chicks and had done all he could” but that the “awkward thing was that they had practically no other relations and that his own affairs took up all his time” (p. 5), both language and sentiment suggest that the frame-narrator is reproducing an ironic undercutting by Douglas of what the uncle had said. At this point in the tale there is no basis for judging how much of the irony originates with the governess, from whom Douglas had the story, nor how adequately she understands the irresponsibility of the uncle. The tale eventually provides a basis for judging, as will be seen below. For the moment, however, what most matters is the implication that the orphans have been abandoned and that the young governess will be called on by her station to rescue them; and this duty will impose a fearful trial. This would have been evident to an attentive reader in 1898 without explicit moralizing. Douglas, indeed, has already said that the tale will contain horrors. Now his prologue has pointed out the quarter in which pain and ugliness will appear. The issues thus posed are moral ones. Among them the central one concerning the governess is her adequacy to perceive and face them. The importance of posing such issues partly accounts for Douglas's remark—no doubt deceptively unemphatic for readers of a later time—that the governess's narrative “really required for a proper intelligence a few words of prologue” (p. 4).

III

When the governess takes up the narrative, she shows that she recognizes and despises the uncle's irresponsibility. Whatever she originally feels about him, she swiftly recovers her judgment. At four points in the story and with increasing emphasis, she condemns him. Her judgment is not merely retrospective, for she partly expresses it to Mrs. Grose and eventually to Miles. Hearing from the housekeeper that the master would not tolerate talebearing because, “‘if people were all right to him …,’” she chimes in, “‘He would n't be bothered with more?’” “This,” says the governess, “squared well enough with my impression of him: he was not a trouble-loving gentleman, nor so very particular perhaps about some of the company he himself kept” (p. 27). Later she remarks to Mrs. Grose, “‘His indifference must have been awful’” (p. 50). These are not the accents of love; even less so is her response to Miles's asking whether his uncle knows “‘the way I'm going on’”: “I recognised quickly enough that I could make, to this enquiry, no answer that would n't involve something of a sacrifice of my employer. Yet it struck me that we were all, at Bly, sufficiently sacrificed to make that venial. ‘I don't think your uncle much cares’” (p. 57). A little later, canvassing the question of why Miles had been expelled from school, she tells Mrs. Grose that it can only have been for wickedness. “‘After all,’ I said, ‘it's their uncle's fault. If he left here such people—!’” Upon which, meeting this as a grave accusation and turning pale, the housekeeper takes the blame on herself, excusing the uncle (illogically) on the ground that he “‘did n't really in the least know them’” (p. 61).

Ultimately the reader's impression of the story greatly depends on the personal aura of the governess. In oral narration her accent and intonation would have counted for much. In the story, oral signs of her character are not available, but we have her prose style, her choices of detail, her turns of thought, and her moral judgments. Something of her presence is suggested in the frame-narrator's comment that Douglas's reading of her manuscript was accomplished “with a fine clearness that was like a rendering to the ear of the beauty of his author's hand” (p. 6). The handwriting implies what her vocal tone would have been; her tone implies her cultivation and her clarity and “authority,” as James called it in his preface to The Turn of the Screw (p. 121).

More directly verifiable, as the tale progresses, are the governess's moral consciousness and her conception of her duty to the children. To some twentieth-century critics she is a monster of suspicion who leaves Miles and Flora no peace. To most Victorians, however, she will have demonstrated a proper concern for the moral welfare of her pupils. “It cannot be supposed that moral and general tuition is a simple matter,” wrote Sir George Stephen. On the contrary, he declared, everyone admits it to be “the most difficult of all tutorial duty,” for “the eye of the governess must be fixed on her pupils from morning till night, every day of existence: her duty is not confined to the school-room, nor to mere lessons on the subjects of study: it extends to every occupation—almost to every word and gesture.”³⁴ Thus “it is the governess who has to pass her daily life with these tender objects of maternal anxiety: every hour of every day is spent with her … it is she and only she [who can see] the hourly indications of temper, of disposition, and even of vice.”³⁵

This burden will have been all the greater for the governess in The Turn of the Screw because she is compelled to act as the sole representative of parental authority. If she feels that rescuing the children is her lone battle, she is only recognizing a responsibility defined by Victorian culture and thrust on her by the moral abdication of her employer. But, in 1898, how reliable should her account of matters have seemed to an attentive and perceptive reader?

IV

Two turning points in the governess's depiction of the children illustrate the ambience imparted to her tale by Victorian attitudes. The first occurs when she learns that Miles has been expelled from school. Her horror at this seems to some twentieth-century readers an instance of her sickness. After all, what could Miles have done that was truly wicked? “No reader assumes that the little boy had done anything very bad,” according to Mark Van Doren. “Nothing bad at all,” Allen Tate agrees. “Some vague little offense against Victorian morality, no doubt,” says Katherine Ann Porter.³⁶ The governess, on the contrary, infers that the boy has been guilty of some real wickedness, since for no other reason could he—bright, handsome, charming—have proved unacceptable (p. 61). Her attitude toward schools in general may also strike twentieth-century readers as a neurotic projection of her own fantasies, for what can she know of “the little horrid unclean school-world” (p. 19), as she calls it? But she is not the only proper maiden in Victorian fiction who takes such a view of schools. Fanny, cousin and mentor to Frederic W. Farrar's Eric, worries about his possible corruption at school. “I have heard strange things of schools; oh, if he should be spoilt and ruined. … Those baby lips, that pure young heart, a year may work sad change in their words and thoughts!”³⁷

It is easy today to laugh at such maidenly worries, but any former schoolboys among James's readers would easily have been able to “think the evil … think it for himself” as James hoped (p. 123). The graduates of public schools in Britain and of their counterparts in the United States could have supplied details such as Thackeray confided to his companions at the Punch dinner table in 1858: “Thackeray says one of the first orders he received [at Charterhouse] was ‘Come & frig me.’”³⁸ Lincoln Steffens, at military school in the early 1880s in California, discovered among the boys “an ancient, highly organized system of prostitution”; yet, he said, it was one of the best private schools in the state.³⁹ In the 1840s, when the action of The Turn of the Screw takes place, the reforms of Thomas Arnold would have been fresh, the struggle to introduce or maintain them outside Rugby would have been vigorous, and the expulsion of a boy for “wickedness” very much in keeping with the masters' aims. Whether or not, in 1898, cultivated male readers knew much about Thomas Arnold, they knew the unclean school world either at first hand or by report. For such readers, the governess's explanation of Miles's dismissal from school was credible.

And both sexes probably could have recalled a fictional precedent. Frederic W. Farrar's Eric, or Little by Little: A Tale of Roslyn School, quoted above, was one of the best-known public school novels in late-Victorian times. It appeared in 1858 and attained no fewer than thirty-six editions by 1903.⁴⁰ In this novel, contamination by a school acquaintance plays a major role. Bull, a schoolfellow of the protagonist, is so wicked, says the narrator, that “happy would it have been for all of them if Bull … had never come to Roslyn school.” “He had tasted more largely of the tree of the knowledge of evil than any other boy. … Bull was the tempter. Secretly, gradually, he dropped into their too willing ears the poison of his polluting acquirements.” As Bull carries on, the narrator apostrophizes his protagonist: “Now Eric, now or never! Life and death, ruin and salvation, corruption and purity, are perhaps in the balance together. …”⁴¹

There is no doubt that Miles would have been considered an injury to his schoolfellows by talking as Bull does. Farrar, certainly, would have sent a boy like Bull away from a school over which he had authority—Farrar who, before becoming Dean of Canterbury, was a master at Harrow and from 1871 to 1876 head of Marlborough. Miles's confession to the governess that he had been dismissed because he “‘said things’” (pp. 86-87) is perfectly plausible. What kind of things is clear: the kind that Bull had said—sexual things, which Miles could have learned only from adults.

Precedent also exists for the governess's interpretation of little Flora's accusations against her, which precipitate another turning point in her perceptions of her pupils. Bell, the spoiled child of Miss Edgeworth's tale “The Birthday Present,” tries but fails to follow her maid's advice “‘to look as if nothing was the matter.’” Trapped in a lie, she flies into a tantrum against Rosamond the heroine: “‘I say I did not!’ cried Bell furiously. ‘Mamma, mamma! Nancy! my cousin Rosamond won't believe me! That's very hard. It's very rude, and I won't bear it—I won't.’”⁴²

The parallel with Flora's behavior extends to her style of speech: “‘I don't know what you mean. I see nobody. I see nothing. I never have. I think you 're cruel. I don't like you!’” This, as the governess correctly observes, is the style of “a vulgarly pert little girl in the street” (p. 73). It lends credence to her judgment that Flora was “hideously hard; she had turned common and almost ugly” (pp. 72-73).

Previously the governess notices that, under the influence she imputes to Miss Jessel, Flora “was not at these times a child, but an old, old woman” (pp. 71-72). This is not necessarily a mere fantasy on the part of the governess. Preternatural aging was a standard attribute of children with precocious knowledge or licentious manners.⁴³ The characterization of Flora as “an old, old woman” struck a reviewer for the New York Times as perfectly natural: “The awful ‘imagination of evil’ this fair boy and girl must possess,” he exclaimed, “the oldness of heart and soul in each young body …” (p. 171).

Thus, all the corrupt traits discerned in Miles and Flora by their governess are traditional consequences of contact with bad servants. The role of the bad servant Quint is stressed in the story, as is his unfitness as a “‘base menial’” to be Miles's companion (pp. 27, 36). Miss Jessel, although a gentlewoman, had transgressed the rules of class and decency under the domination of Quint. As his victim and accomplice, she had exposed the children to his influence. Her employer had facilitated her corruption by leaving Quint at Bly “‘in charge’” with “‘everything to say—even about them’” (pp. 24, 27). By force of personality, depth of evil, and the power vested in him by the master, Quint was the dominant member of the guilty pair, the devil and seducer from the servant class.

Nevertheless, the governess (unlike a typical paranoid) worries that her suspicions about Miles may be wrong: “if he were innocent what then on earth was I?” (p. 87). Her worry can hardly have erased the impression that many details in the story would have combined to convey to a literate Victorian: “the impression of the communication to the children of the most infernal imaginable evil and danger” by their false friends, the dead Quint and Miss Jessel.

V

It is possible for a late twentieth-century reader to confess, “I do not truly feel the corruption of the children or the horror of their putative relations with Quint and Jessel.”⁴⁴ The revulsion of the original circle of readers, attested by virtually all the early reviews, no doubt was connected with the sexual transgressions imputed to the children; yet there was something more involved. In addition to horror, there was fear. This is suggested by reviews that compared the story to “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” or told of the writer's responding “with a shudder and a creepiness to the hint of the gruesome to whose contemplation we were invited—a hint that had its fulfillment in such vividness that we were glad … to finish the reading in the obtrusively human companionship of a crowded trolley car” or that warned “persons of a highly sensitive nature” to read the story “before nightfall, unless they wish to be thoroughly alarmed.”⁴⁵ What was there in the story to frighten its readers in 1898?

The answer, it may be suggested, lies partly in those elements of the tale that have struck later readers as ambiguous. For critics such as Edmund Wilson and John Lydenberg, the tale presents equivocal signs of what is happening: one cannot be sure of the facts. For Peter Coveney, on the contrary, “the depravity of the children is a given fact” and what is ambiguous is the response to this fact which the story seems to demand. “… James introduces an ambiguity as to the attitude he requires from us towards them. The boy is at once vicious and corrupt and yet pathetic, the victim of the Governess's cruel pursuit. The Governess herself is at once the virtuous agent of the child's salvation, and at the same time an executioner, a clumsy and deranged pursuer. There seems in James a conflict in himself which he translated into the ambiguities of this painful story—the pursuit of the admission of guilt and resentment of the agent of discovery.”⁴⁶

Victorians, however, could have had little doubt that the governess was compelled to “hound” the children. In a sense this is what governesses were for, in an age that laid more stress on parental authority than on infantine spontaneity. Watchfulness and cross-questioning, as Victorians viewed them, were not hounding at all, but loving care. Anxiety produced in the readers of 1898 would not have been a simple and direct response to some vision of the governess as a relentless pursuer, and it was probably more than a displaced emotion stirred by infantile sexual bogeys.⁴⁷ Walter Houghton has discussed the “unmistakable note of horror and fear” in Victorian writings about unrestrained sexuality. He has also treated the Victorian belief that sexual misconduct can destroy society, a belief exemplified in Tennyson's Idylls of the King.⁴⁸ The danger to society, in which we may read mainly a threat to middle- and upper-class culture, furnishes one key to the anxieties stirred in Victorian readers by The Turn of the Screw.

It was partly the civility and, ideally, the moral superiority of the possessing classes that justified their social position and made it something more than a reward for elbowing one's way above the mass. It was lack of sobriety, frugality, industry, and—above all—lack of sexual restraint in the degraded poor that kept them poor, Malthus had long ago argued. But sexuality was perpetually threatening to leap out of the lower classes and attack the moral claims of their employers, to thrust aside barriers erected by social training, and, finally, to obliterate class distinctions. Especially was this the case in a servant-filled household. Social revolutionaries recognized the potency of the threat. “Take your revenge by depraving the children of your masters!” cried a revolutionary journal at Lyons to working girls in the homes of the bourgeoisie.⁴⁹ In The Turn of the Screw, Miss Jessel is first a victim, then the instrument, of a servant's assault on respectability.

Quint and Miss Jessel, moreover, are nightmare parodies of the respectable tutors who inducted the young into civilized amenity. They exactly reverse the teaching of proper tutors and governesses; thereby, they undo the training required for membership in the higher classes. The consequent loss of status for Miles is marked by his disgrace at school; for Flora, it is marked by her coarseness in accusing the governess in the accents of a “vulgarly pert little girl in the street.”

We may hazard the speculation that this fictive situation also acts out a repressed wish, perhaps an infantile fantasy of being given a sexual carte blanche by adults. (Sometimes, we know, this was more than a fantasy.)⁵⁰ If the fantasy, repressed the more strongly because of its power, was reactivated by The Turn of the Screw in 1898, it could only have added to the gruesome, nightmarish quality mentioned by the reviews. It would have been exacerbated by what the story seems to say in its latent content: that to deprive a person of sexuality is to deprive him of life; for, on an unconscious level, it may well seem that the loss of erotic freedom is what kills little Miles at the end of the tale.

“Exposure,” then, occurs in at least four different senses in The Turn of the Screw. There is, first, the exposure of Miss Jessel, the lady seduced by a lower-class man. Second, and centrally for James, there is the exposure of the children. It is possible to view them as representatives of the hapless Victorian ego, subject to contradictory demands by morality and by Eros, the one threatening to stifle instinctual life, the other enticing to social and eternal damnation. Third, there is the exposure of the higher classes and their privileges, which may be swept away if morality and gentility crumble. Finally, there is the exposure of the governess. In her desire to save the children, she underestimates the effect of evil on herself. Her zeal and her youthful vanity, and at length her desire for vindication, carry her too far, first with Flora and then, disastrously, with Miles.⁵¹ Because she represents civilization, her helplessness to overcome the Yahoo in human nature is frightening indeed.

Notes

1. See the review from the New York Times reprinted in Robert Kimbrough, ed., The Turn of the Screw:An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Essays in Criticism (New York, 1966), p. 170; also reviews in the Literary World (Boston) 29, no. 23 (November 12, 1899): 368, and the Literary World (London) 58, N.S. 1519 (December 9, 1898): 456. Two early comments reprinted by Kimbrough mention a suspension of opinion about the ghosts' reality but treat it as ultimately resolved in favor of the governess's view: “the reader who begins by questioning whether she is supposed to be sane ends by accepting her conclusions” (p. 174); cf. Oliver Elton's remarks (p. 176). Citations from The Turn of the Screw or from other material in the Kimbrough edition will be identified by page numbers in parentheses.

2. Phelps's comments first appeared in William Lyon Phelps, “Henry James,” Yale Review 5 (1916): 783-97, and were quoted by Edna Kenton in “Henry James to the Ruminant Reader: The Turn of the Screw,” The Arts 6 (1924): 245-55. They are excerpted in Kimbrough, p. 178. Kenton's essay is reprinted in Gerald Willen, A Casebook on Henry James's “The Turn of the Screw,” 2d ed. (New York, 1969), pp. 102-14. For examples of recent deconstructive or ironic readings, see Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman, Yale French Studies, no. 55/56 (New Haven, Conn., 1978), pp. 94-207, and Shlomith Rimmon, The Concept of Ambiguity—the Example of James (Chicago, 1977), pp. 116-66.

3. James Mark Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Race: Methods and Processes, 2d ed. (New York, 1895), p. 365. Baldwin, recognized as an authority, thanks distinguished colleagues, among them William James, for suggestions used in his text (p. xi).

4. Henry James to F. W. H. Myers, December 19, 1898, in Percy Lubbock, ed., The Letters of Henry James, 2 vols. (New York, 1920), 1:300; reprinted in Kimbrough, p. 112, and Willen, p. 382.

5. Maria Edgeworth, The Parent's Assistant (1796-1800; reprint ed., London, 1907), p. 3. This children's classic was reprinted at least twelve times by 1897. The Macmillan reprint of 1907 contains a laudatory introduction by Thackeray's daughter, Lady Ritchie.

6. Ibid., pp. 159-60, 164.

7. Richard and Maria Edgeworth, Essays on Practical Education, 2 vols. (London, 1815), 1:165, 167-68. This appears to be a reprint of the third edition (London, 1811). Earlier editions were entitled Practical Education.

8. Practical Education (1815), 2:414.

9. I can find no record of a British edition later than 1815. The latest U.S. edition is that of Harper & Bros. (New York, 1835). James read the novels of Maria Edgeworth in childhood (“Chester,” in English Hours, ed. Alma L. Lowe [New York, 1960], p. 43).

10. Practical Education, 1:156.

11. William Godwin, The Enquirer. Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature. In a Series of Essays (London, 1798), pp. 201-2.

12. Ibid., p. 202.

13. F. J. Harvey Darton, Children's Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life, 2d ed. (Cambridge, 1958), p. 175.

14. Gillian E. Avery and Angela Bull, Nineteenth Century Children: Heroes and Heroines in English Children's Stories 1780-1900 (London, 1965), pp. 175, 83.

15. Mrs. [Henry] Sherwood, The History of the Fairchild Family; or, The Child's Manual (London, n.d.), p. 438.

16. Ibid., p. 36.

17. Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey, The World's Classics, no. 141 (London, 1967), pp. 16, 156.

18. John Robinson, “A Butler's View of Men-Service,” Nineteenth Century 31 (1892): 925-33. See also Violet Lady Greville, “Men Servants in England,” National Review 18 (1892): 812-20.

19. Robinson, p. 926.

20. Ibid., pp. 926-27, 929-31.

21. [Sir] G[eorge] S[tephen], The Governess (London, 1844, 186[7?]), p. 20. This work was in print at least until 1881: a copy in the Library of Congress is stamped, “Received Library/AUG 4 1881/U.S. Patent Office.”

22. Ibid., pp. 50, 8.

23. Elizabeth Rigby (subsequently Lady Eastlake), “Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, and the Governesses' Benevolent Institution,” Quarterly Review 84 (1848); 153-85; Harriet Martineau, “Female Industry,” Edinburgh Review 222 (1859): 293-336; and “The Governess: Her Health,” Once a Week 3 (September 1, 1860): 267-72.

24. See John Thurnam, Observations and Essays on the Statistics of Insanity … to Which Are Added the Statistics of the Retreat, Near York (London, 1845), table 9, “Shewing the Rank or Profession of the Patients,” with Thurnam's comment on this table, pp. 72-73; also the Statistical Appendix to the Report of the Metropolitan Commissioners in Lunacy to the Lord Chancellor, Ordered by the House of Commons to Be Printed, 8 August 1844 (1844), pp. 4-11. The detailed analysis supporting my argument is too long to be presented here. The reports of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution are summarized in [Bessie Rayner (Parkes) Belloc], “The Profession of the Teacher: The Annual Reports of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution, from 1843 to 1864,” in Essays on Woman's Work (London, 1865), pp. 87-98; see also her essay, “The Profession of the Teacher: The Annual Reports of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution, from 1843 to 1856,” English Woman's Journal 1 (1858): 5-6.

25. Daniel Hack Tuke, “Modern Life and Insanity,” Macmillan's Magazine 37 (1877): 130-33; cf. chaps. v and vi of his Insanity in Ancient and Modern Life (London, 1878), esp. pp. 87 ff.

26. Patricia Thomson, The Victorian Heroine: A Changing Ideal 1837-1873 (London, 1956), pp. 49-53; see also E. M. Delafield [Edmée Elizabeth Monica de la Pasture], Ladies and Gentlemen in Victorian Fiction (New York, 1937), pp. 83-85; Katharine West, A Chapter of Governesses: A Study of the Governess in English Fiction 1800-1949 (London, 1949), pp. 54-186.

27. See, in addition to Belloc's essays cited in n. 24 above, [Elizabeth Missing Sewell], Principles of Education … Applied to Female Education in the Upper Classes (1865; reprint ed., New York, 1866), p. 417; Mrs. Anna [Brownell] Jameson, “On the Relative Social Position of Mothers and Governesses,” in Memories and Essays Illustrative of Art, Literature, and Social Morals (London, 1846), p. 273; and esp. [John Duguid Milne], Industrial and Social Position of Women, in the Middle and Lower Ranks (London, 1857), p. 132.

28. Mary Maxe, “On Governesses,” National Review 37 (1901): 397-402.

29. A. W. Pollard, “The Governess and Her Grievances,” Murray's Magazine 5 (1889): 505-15.

30. Cf. Harriet Martineau, “The Governess: Her Health,” p. 269, with The Turn of the Screw, pp. 5, 19-20, 38-40.

31. Cf. p. 265 above.

32. Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven, Conn., 1957), pp. 343-53, esp. p. 343, n. 7.

33. Samuel Smiles, Character, rev. ed. (London, 1882), pp. 37-38.

34. Stephen (n. 21 above), pp. 49-50.

35. Ibid., p. 18.

36. “James: ‘The Turn of the Screw,’” radio transcript in Mark Van Doren, ed., New Invitation to Learning (New York, 1942), p. 231; reprinted in Willen (n. 2 above), p. 168.

37. Frederic W. Farrar, Eric: or, Little by Little: A Tale of Roslyn School (1858; reprint ed., New York, n.d.), p. 12.

38. Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity 1811-1846 (New York, 1955), p. 86, n. 39.

39. Lincoln Steffens, The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 2 vols. (New York, 1931), 1:104-5, 103.

40. Darton (n. 13 above), pp. 293-94.

41. Farrar, pp. 98-99.

42. Edgeworth (n. 5 above), pp. 160, 164.

43. See, e.g., Charles Dickens, Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son, The New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London, 1950), p. 394, and Bleak House, The New Oxford Illustrated Dickens (London, 1948), pp. 275, 288; W. M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair: A Novel without a Hero, ed. Geoffrey and Kathleen Tillotson (Boston, 1963), p. 21; Margaret May, “Innocence and Experience: The Evolution of the Concept of Juvenile Delinquency in the Mid-nineteenth Century,” Victorian Studies 17 (1973): 7-29.

44. John Lydenberg, “The Governess Turns the Screw,” in Willen (n. 2 above), p. 276.

45. See the reviews cited above, n. 1.

46. Peter Coveney, Poor Monkey: The Child in Literature (London, 1957), pp. 164, 166-67.

47. See Mark Spilka, “Turning the Freudian Screw: How Not to Do It” (1963), in Kimbrough, pp. 245-53, esp. p. 253. Spilka's hypothesis about the latent meaning of the story, in the psychoanalytic sense, is somewhat modified and extended in the present essay.

48. Houghton (n. 32 above), pp. 359-72.

49. Cited by E. A. Sheppard, Henry James and “The Turn of the Screw” (Auckland, 1974), p. 100, n. 148. This incitement was mentioned by Alfred Fouillée, “Les Jeunes Criminels, l'école et la presse” (Revue des deux mondes 139 [1897]: 417-49), which Henry James may have seen.

50. Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, The Unnatural History of the Nanny (New York, 1973), pp. 163, 99-100.

51. She speaks of her own “exposure” and “danger,” pp. 34, 52. She recognizes in retrospect—partly also at moments of her adventure—that she “had gone too far” with Miles (p. 65); with Flora (p. 75); and again, catastrophically, with Miles (p. 87).