Essay On The Turn Of The Screw

Kat L.
Van Deren
College Prep English
6 March, 2013
The Turn of the Screw The phrase “turn of the screw” means to make a bad situation worse, especially in order to force someone to do something. The book “The Turn of the Screw”, written by Henry James, is about a bad situation escalating into a horrendous situation. This book is about a 20 year old woman who becomes a governess for two young children, whose names are Miles and Flora. She works for a man whose only rule is for her not to bother him, and as the book progresses’ keeping no contact with “the master” becomes increasingly harder. The Governess would like to see herself as a heroin, and begins to see ghosts. The ghosts in this book are not real, but she convinces herself and the housekeeper (Mrs. Grose) that they are. Throughout this psychological thriller, The Governess thinks she sees ghosts, convinces Mrs. Grose that the ghosts are real and that the children know what is going on, and finally goes crazy. This book is set sometime in the 1830s to 1840s. Everything takes place in “the master’s” country home, Bly. This book starts off innocent enough, but little hints are dropped that all is not perfect at Bly. The Governess starts at the house, and meets little Flora. She immediately has a strange view of the child. Looking back, I realize that there had to be something off about a woman back then, for her to take on complete control of a house at age 20. The Governess does not realize who the first “ghost” is until she describes him to Mrs. Grose. She sees Peter Quint twice, and then tells Mrs. Grose that she had seen him. The Governess has to goad Mrs. Grose into telling her that it was Peter Quint. She says that he is never a gentleman, and Mrs. Grose says, “a gentleman HE” (James, 18), which means that she knows he is not a gentleman. After Mrs. Grose says that, The Governess prompts her saying, “You know him then” (James 18), which means she is trying to get Mrs. Grose to say what she wants to hear. Peter Quint was a former valet for “the master”, and he slipped and hit his head while he was drunk, which killed him. Later in the book, The Governess may or may not have seen Miss Jessel when she and Flora were by a lake. She thinks to herself, “I began to take in with certitude, and yet without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person” (James 22), which means that she originally does not see Miss Jessel. She uses Flora’s concentration on playing as proof that there was a ghost. When she talks to Mrs. Grose about Miss Jessel, she does not wait for her to figure out who she is talking about. She flat out says that she saw her predecessor, even though we are not positive that she saw anything. While The Governess is talking to Mrs. Grose, she is struggling to convince her that the ghosts are real, and that the children know. When she first tells Mrs. Grose about Quint, The Governesses thoughts are presumptuous about Mrs. Grose’s thoughts. The Governess thinks that they are in this “thing” together, saying, “It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together in presence of what we now had to live with as we could-my dreadful liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and my companions knowledge, henceforth-a knowledge half consternation and half compassion-of that liability” (James 19), but this means that she has to convince Mrs. Grose that she is telling her the truth. The Governess says that they shut themselves in the schoolroom to “have it out”, meaning that the Governess has to persuade Mrs. Grose of what she believes. After she knows that Mrs. Grose believes her, she tells her that the children know what is going on. The Governess says, “they KNOW-it’s too monstrous: they know, they know” (James 23), she is not certain that the children know, but she assumes that they know. The reason that she thinks the children know is because Flora concentrated on playing, and did not say

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