The Turn of the Screw

Paper Summary:

This paper briefly discusses what type of story James intended when he wrote "The Turn of the Screw". It discusses his target audience and the way the story develops around the central characters. The theme of a ghost story is examined in detail.

From the Paper:

"In this story, there is one main thing to contemplate. What is the truth? After reading The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, I thought that it was nothing more than a boring, old-fashioned ghost story. The reason that I thought this was because of the way that I read the story. I believed everything that the governess said was the truth because I have always believed what the main characters have said. This is exactly how James intended most of his readers to take the story. On the other hand, there are others who have read this book and thought that the governess was a liar. They thought that she made the ghosts up and that she was just trying to get attention for herself. Some also thought that she was a sexually deprived person, and that she was making up the ghosts because she was missing a male companion in her life. Some critics believed that James wanted this book to confuse it's readers, but others thought that James didn't even know if the ghosts were real himself. That in itself is the question that everyone wants to know the answer to. Is the governess really seeing the ghosts, or is she just a sexually deprived babysitter who wanted a man in her life so badly that she had to make up an invisible friend."

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