From the moment of its publication, The Turn of the Screw has continuously been a challenge both for the common reading and for criticism. We, the readers, when being unaware of its complexity, may be very easily carried away and fall into all the traps provided by the intricacies of the text.

The value, and of course, the beauty of the The Turn of the Screw lies in its challenging and well-constructed “interpretive dilemma” which we have to face. Guided by the will of knowledge and of making sense, understanding is our basic expectation when reading the short-story. We are willing and quite eager to sign “the fictional pact” and accept the world of the text as a true one, actually as a possible one. The text seems to undermine these very facts, as it is liable to any kind of interpretation. After finishing reading, we feel puzzled and frustrated which is due to the sudden ending, in contrast with the extended beginning.

Bearing in mind the fact that “the Prologue” plays the most important part in the organization of the text, we have to read it very carefully. We have to read it somehow prejudiced in order to understand it. A few details about the author of The Turn

The age in which Henry James wrote is significant. His text portrayed the form of the modernist writing, as being grounded on the change of “the canon”. Being written at the turn of the 19th century, The Turn of the Screw displays the deviation from the norm. The short-story is based on a paradox: the gap between the factual level of the text, the way the governess acts, her words and her attitudes, and the textual level, what is rendered, implied by the text. The short-story seems a subtle and unconventional ghost story that concentrates on the psychological rather than the actual. Are the ghosts a real danger to the children or merely imagined by a lonely and susceptible woman? Denotation is prevailed by connotation.

“The Prologue” works as a magic mirror or as a magnifying glass for the further reading. There are some details whose function is to subvert the reader’s perception of the text. For example in the first paragraph, we find the image of the house: “the case, I may mention, was of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion”. We will find the same kind of image in the first chapter of the governess’ story: “I had the view of a castle of romance, inhabited by a rosy sprite, such a place would somehow, for diversion of the young idea, take color out of story books and fairytales. (…) No, it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely at the helm!” The governess’ hesitation, indecision, are a clear hint of her re-experiencing allover the events. It renders the unfolding of a past, which implies the distance between the happening and the telling. The governess has to remember in order to put the story down on paper, meaning that the reader has access only to her subjectivity.

“The Prologue” begins in “medias res”: “the story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless…” It sets the frame of the story on three reference points: the place – the old house – the time – the evening or the night when stories are told – and the cultural setting – the reference to ghost stories.

The governess becomes unworthy of our trust by the way she describes the setting in the first chapter. The frequency of the verbs “I remember”, “I think”, “I suppose”, “I believe” brings forward the technique of ambiguity: the sentences challenge doubt and uncertainty. Her hesitations and contradictions imply that she is under the pressure of the scenery; we don’t know whether the setting is as she describes it, as we have only her impressions available. Her story is an enactment of memory, which carries a subjective imprint. Also she is under the pressure of the promise to her master as she herself admits that she had already been carried away in London, in Harley street by her master who “prove the gentleman, a bachelor in a prime of life, such a figure as have never risen, saving a dream or in an old novel befor

Some topics in this essay:
Henry James, London Harley, Henry James’s, England United, “the prologue”, James American, henry james, feel puzzled, brings forward, embedded story, sister’s governess, text short-story, “the local”, miles dead, relationship “the,