The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew, and: The Turn of the Screw: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism (review)

Neil Cornwell, and Maggie Malone, eds. The Turn of the Screw and What Maisie Knew: New Critical Essays. New York: St. Martin's, 1998. 252 pp. $45.

Henry James. The Turn of the Screw: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren, eds. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1999. 271 pp. $9.

Arriving close on the heels of the centenary of the tale's publication, these two volumes testify to the secure position that "The Turn of the Screw" holds in James studies and in the undergraduate canon. Yet their very appearance begs the question of their provenance--whence and why?--even as it forecloses on that very question. A Norton edition (especially a second one) of any work has the air of a tautological self-justification. And a collection of New Critical Essays presents itself as a supplement to a body of worthy "old" ones, even as it signifies the contemporary currency of the work it discusses. In both instances we are dealing with a publishing genre whose tendency (if not intention) is to affirm and reproduce the status of a particular literary work as worthy of particular kinds of attention, whether in the context of teaching (as with the Norton) or scholarly inquiry (as with the New Critical Essays). Each of these volumes fulfills the requirements of its genre more than adequately, with the New Critical Essays collection providing some additional interest and provocation, for reasons I shall discuss shortly. But first, to summarize the merits of each on its own terms.

The Critical Edition, as is usual in the Norton series, augments the text of "The Turn of the Screw" itself with a constellation of appendices: notebook and prefatory material from the author, early reviews, vintage textual illustrations, and an historical overview of relevant literary criticism. The keynote for this overview is Edna Kenton's 1924 essay, whose epistemological riddle--Is the governess mad, or are the ghosts real?--establishes the basic paradigm for most of the other interpretations included here. This is true not only of the early psychoanalytic readings offered by Goddard and Wilson but also of more recent work such as Shoshana Felman's remarkable post-Freudian analysis, Henry Sussman's parsing of the Hegelian subtext of the governess's imputed hysteria, and Ned Lukacher's response to Felman. As represented here, criticism on "The Turn of the Screw" seems engaged in a struggle--ultimately unsuccessful--to escape the basic interpretive agenda established early on by Kenton and Wilson.

The critical appendix also includes another group of essays (as with the first, all present in excerpted form) that engage issues of epistemology and narratology, notably Paul Armstrong's treatment of the linkage between historical and literary representation and T. J. Lustig's appreciation of the ghostly "absences" that drive the tale. But for the most part, even these inclusions distinguish themselves by their revisions of those two related questions--the psychology of the governess, the meaning of the ghosts--whose entanglement represents the primal scene of "The Turn of the Screw" criticism. Only the selection from Bruce Robbins (whose Marxist reading of the tale is more completely represented in the St. Martin's Bedford Critical Edition) offers much outside the boundary of this basic critical matrix. The difficulty, as always in such cases, is how to make what is present in the critical appendices suggest what has been left out, and why--a gesture that would in some ways be antithetical to the air of authority and reliability by which the Norton editions define their marketing niche in the academy.

In terms of this gesture, the New Critical Essays volume is more successful by virtue of the less definitive claims it implicitly makes for itself. There is some overlap with the Norton, but while New...