I know, as if I were crazy; and its a wonder I’m not. What I’ve seen would have made you so; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get ahold of still other things.

If there’s one thing I learned from Portrait of a Lady, its not to expect a neat ending from Henry James. In fact, he seems to relish the act of carrying us to culmination or climax only to clip it back immediately with failure and despair (take this ending for instance). Here, as in Portrait, James leaves us with more questions than answers, including this pressing one: what is exactly is he trying to say?

Its my understanding that one of James’ artistic obsessions was “the American abroad”; a protagonist which enters a wider world than they have known, bringing their regional peculiarities with them. In Turn of the Screw we do not go abroad exactly - at least not on the physical plane - but we do have a protagonist suddenly exposed to a much larger, grander world than she has known.

We went straight to the lake, as it was called at Bly, and I daresay rightly called, though I reflect it may in fact have been a sheet of water less remarkable than it appeared to my untraveled eyes. My acquaintance with sheets of water was small, and the pool of Bly, at all events on the few occasions of my consenting, under the protection of my pupils, to affront its surface in the old flat-bottomed boat moored there for our use, had impressed me both with its extent and its agitation. (She goes on to explain that it can be walked all the way round in 10 or so minutes. )

But it is not only small bodies of water with which our governess is enamored and dazzled, for before she ever lays eyes on “Bly” she encounters the handsome Gentleman-Uncle who wishes to employ her. She’s so impressed with the fellow that she agrees to a strange situation, the responsibilities of which seem not only beyond her but unreasonable to boot, and to add even more flavor to this dangerous concoction of flattered pride and repressed infatuation, take the grisly fact of her predecessor having passed away during her employment. This event, like all of the immoral or unpleasant acts of the book, is presented vaguely. The protagonist finds herself in an environment where nothing can be said aloud that isn’t pretty and pleasing, where wickedness is committed in plain sight by people too confident in the observer’s politeness or indifference to worry whether or not they are found out.

(Well. That is if they, meaning these supposed perpetrators, are there at all.)

The governess rebels almost immediately against evil apparitions and conspiratorial children, but seems to gloss over the fact of her master’s negligence (and sexual misconduct?). She and another servant shudder to think what evils may have occurred in regard to the children, but what eventually comes out is not nearly so perverse as their imaginations implied. Even the spirits never actually do anything that scary (other than making overly prolonged eye contact. Yikes!)

No, the real horror of Turn of the Screw lies in what might have happened, in what eventually might. In questioning whether our narrator’s true enemy is an evil spirit or her own mind. Its in the terrifying ambiguity of things. Because life, like this story, can be interpreted in many different, equally convincing ways, and we - inexperienced, overwhelmed, and full of our own imaginative longings - must somehow muddle through.

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