the ambiguity of henry james edmund wilson

This possibility-and the well-read but inexperienced 20-year-old governess is well aware of it as a romantic possibility-never materializes. James teases us-and his heroine-with the possibility that this story is another Pamela or Jane Eyre, that the governess will win the heart of the Master and superintend the estate not as his employee but as its mistress. The Master specifies that he is not to be disturbed by reports of what happens at Bly: he gives the governess full authority over the household, which also includes a company of domestic servants headed by the kindly Mrs. First is the “outside spectator, observer.” For this role, James took a cue from earlier British fiction and invented a nameless governess, “the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson.” She answers an ad from a London gentleman to look after his orphaned niece and nephew, Miles and Flora, at Bly, his country estate. The Turn of the Screw does relate the above plot, but with two complications. The story to be told-tolerably obviously-by an outside spectator, observer. It is a question of the children ‘coming over to where they are.’ It is all obscure and imperfect, the picture, the story, but there is a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect in it. So long as the children are kept from them, they are not lost but they try and try and try, these evil presences, to get hold of them. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions, figures, return to haunt the house and children, to whom they seem to beckon, whom they invite and solicit, from across dangerous places, the deep ditch of a sunk fence, etc.-so that the children may destroy themselves, lose themselves, by responding, by getting into their power.

The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children the children are bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree.

Note here the ghost-story told me at Addington (evening of Thursday 10th), by the Archbishop of Canterbury: the mere vague, undetailed, faint sketch of it-being all he had been told (very badly and imperfectly), by a lady who had no art of relation, and no clearness: the story of the young children (indefinite number and age) left to the care of servants in an old country-house, through the death, presumably, of parents. How did this 1898 novella become modern and postmodern literary theory’s most inscrutable touchstone? According to Henry James’s Notebooks-and scholars have disputed this, but then they dispute everything, as we’ll see-he got the kernel of the novella, a ghost story, from the Archbishop of Canterbury:

The ambiguity of henry james edmund wilson