Henry James - The Turn of The Screw

His interest in details blends very well to his passion for studying the inner mechanics of human psychology.
             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 short-story is opened to widely different interpretations because none of the three narrators within the text is endowed with an omniscient vision. The narrative frame is no longer provided with "a god", which implies that is no longer governed by "the rule". The reader is allowed more or less to make his own rule. Relativity and paradox prevail and if any explanation is possible, it means that there is no proper explanation, so The Turn of the Screw has continuously challenged the reader and has given way to a lot of questions and a lot more misunderstandings. .
             The short-story stirs the reader by the form in which it was put on paper. He becomes aware that in a way or another, he is manipulated and wants to know who is behind the stage and laughs at him. While reading he objects to having available only the governesses perspective and wonders who pulls the strings there. He may inference that Douglas has altered the original manuscript "in old faded ink and in the most beautiful hand", or that the narrator in "the Prologue" is not telling the truth when explaining: "let me say here distinctly, to have done with it, that this narrative, from an exact transcript of my own made much later, is what I shall presently give".