However, the account that the narrator, Douglas, reads to his listeners is a first-person narrative written by the governess who cares for the two children, Miles and Flora, at the center of the drama. Told as a story to a fictional audience, James’s text initially seems to conform to traditional forms of realist narrative. Because these accounts often unwittingly recreate the narrative strategies they set out to critique, recently they have become the subject of intellectual analysis in their own right. That same ambiguity has continued to structure conversations, beginning in the 1950s, about whether the ghosts in James’s text are “real” or the narrator’s hallucinations. The ambiguity of James’s popular novella substantially added to the suspense that made it a favorite thriller among contemporary readers. Quickly becoming Henry James’s most popular piece of short fiction, The Turn of the Screw reflects the significant shift that occurred in James’s writing during the late 1890s-the period identified as his “experimental phase.” Characterized by an increasing ambiguity that worked to undermine the narrative conventions of realist fiction, The Turn of the Screw and James’s other experimental texts (including What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, and The Sacred Fount) move beyond the strict Realism that characterized his early work and suggest the modernist techniques that would typify his “major phase” novels of the first decade of the 20th century.
“The Turn of the Screw” was first published as a serial in Collier’s Weekly in 1898 and appeared later the same year in book form, in The Two Magics. Analysis of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screwīy NASRULLAH MAMBROL on February 10, 2022
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