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Henry James's Reading of The Turn of the Screw: Parts II and III by Donal O'Gorman, St. Michael's College, University of Toronto Part Two IV. The World of Spirits Having examined, among the Ideas associated with Christmas, the significance of both servants and children, we may now turn to the third element that James Indicated as essential to The Turn of the Screw: prowling spirits. The nature of these apparitions, and their function In the story, are matters on which any Interpretation of the text remains utterly dependent; it Is simply not acceptable to dismiss them as pseudo-problems. No less than the governess, no less than the children, Quint and Miss Jesse I deserve to be scrutinized with "fine attention"—the hallmark of "earnest criticism," according to the Master. We shall therefore strive for the greatest precision possible as we move into the blurry spirit-world to which they belong; as the governess says with unconscious humor, It is "a case for a sense of shades."1 If we are to believe the author's reiterated statements, Quint and Miss J esse I are creatures of a free-wheeling imagination guided solely by the demands of the story. These demands, to be sure, must have been largely self-imposed; as James wrote to A. C. Benson in 1898, he had taken the "few meagre elements" transmitted to him by the late Archbishop and had elaborated them "quite gruesomely as my unbridled imagination caused me to see the inevitable development of the subject."2 Nor was this appeal to poetic license unwarranted; we have seen with what freedom of fancy he was to treat the "servant" theme! However, he would enjoy less latitude in the case of the prowling spirits, for they were part and parcel of the "strangely gruesome effect"^ that had struck him, in the original anecdote, as being "of a nature to rouse the dear old sacred terror" (p. xv). And the source of that gruesome effect had not been the mere fact of visitation by these dreadful specters, but rather what James wi I I refer to in the Preface as "the villainy of motive in the evoked predatory creatures" (p. xx). The Notebook entry of 1895 had been more explicit: "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."4 This sense of a persistent menace, of a purposeful malevolence emanating from beyond the grave, had to be retained at all costs in the apparitions to be created. They would thus be "figures in an action"; and the tale as 1. The Novels and Tales of Henry James, XII (New York: Scribner's, 1908), 207. Parenthetic references In my text to The Turn of the Screw and to James's Preface are to this edition. 2. To A. C. Benson, March 11, 1898, in Percy Lubbock, ed., The Letters of Henry James, 2 vols. (London: Scribner's, 1920), I, 287 (hereafter cited as "Lubbock, Letters"), rpt. in Robert Kimbrough, ed., The Turn of the Screw, A Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), p. 108 (hereafter cited as the "Norton Edition"). 3. The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. 0. Matthlessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1947), pp. 178-79. 4. Notebooks, 178-79. 228 James conceived It was "an action, desperately, or It was nothing" (p. xx). Given this Ineluctable requirement, he saw himself forced to renounce any attempt to model his "abnormal agents" after the "ghosts" described in the annals of psychical research. As these contemporary records consistently proved, attested apparitions were—for whatever reason—singularly limited In the scope of their activities.5 Consequently, he felt authorized to "depart altogether from the rules" and to permit his "hovering prowling blighting presences" to function as his artistic fancy might dictate: They would be agents In fact; there would be laid on them the dire duty of causing the situation to reek with the air of Evil. Their desire and their ability to do so, visibly measuring meanwhile their effect, together with their observed and described...

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