Ambiguity: Teaching The Turn of the Screw to High School Juniors

Make no mistake about it, teaching Henry James to high school students is not in vogue at the present time. I teach Junior English at both the “Honors” and “Comprehensive” levels at a public high school in a suburb just outside Louisville, Kentucky. This school calls itself “traditional,” which in our community means that we have a dress code and are supposed by some to be more serious about academics than are other public schools. Our Junior English course is centered around American literature, but the teaching of writing is of ever-increasing importance since under the Kentucky Education Reform Act (KERA) schools are judged, in part, on the quality of their students’ writing portfolios. Because the pieces in these portfolios are assessed most stringently on whether they are clearly focused on a “real world” audience and purpose, formal academic papers are implicitly discouraged. Therefore, the teaching of serious literature has become questionable when compared to such activities as writing business letters and reading newspaper editorials. There seems to be scant appreciation for the value of exploring and appreciating literature for its own sake in the high school English classroom. Therefore, when I decided to teach Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw in my “Honors” classes, I felt that I needed to justify its importance as a teaching tool, not simply as a literary work.

I began by noticing how difficult it is for my students to deal with ambiguity. Perhaps because they have been schooled on true/false and multiple choice exams and have spent their youths hearing diatribes from religious and political absolutists, it’s difficult for them to accept or even to comprehend the concept of ambiguity. In fact, surprisingly few of these students were familiar with either the word or the concept of ambiguity. I decided that because of this lack of understanding, I could justify using The Turn of the Screw as a means of teaching this “real world” concept.

The next problem was that, surprisingly, the English department had only seven copies of the book. I have found it very difficult in the past to get books ordered at my school unless there are several teachers interested in teaching a given text, so I decided that trying to persuade the department to order sixty or so copies of The Turn of the Screw would almost certainly be time-consuming and perhaps ultimately futile as well. Luckily I recalled seeing $1 Dover Thrift editions of the book at a local bookstore and decided to purchase them with my own money and then sell the books to the students directly. After all, I figured any teenager could certainly afford to purchase a $1 book. Although there were a few minor grumblings from a couple of students about this arrangement, everyone eventually acquiesced, and we were able to begin the novella without any major traumas.

Since my primary justification for using this text was in order to teach the concept of ambiguity and to help students to make sense for themselves out of ambiguous situations and texts, I knew I wanted to be very careful, especially early in the process of our reading, not to bias them toward or away from any particular interpretation. I had a few years earlier, as a graduate student at the University of Louisville, written a paper of my own on The Turn of the Screw. This paper can best be described in current academic lingo as a “Queer” reading, centering around the governess and her fanatical homophobia, which eventually leads her to seduce Miles in a desperate attempt to “save” him. Because I felt strongly about my views on the text, I did not want to share my interpretation with my students before they had the chance to formulate their own views. I was afraid that students would begin to play the game of simply saying what they thought I would want them to say rather than thinking for themselves. As an openly gay teacher, I was doubly concerned that students not feel that I was imposing my own sensibility on their readings...