Early criticism
The horror of the story comes from the force with which it makes us realize the power that our minds possess for such excursions into the darkness; when certain lights sink or certain barriers are lowered, the ghosts of the mind, untraced desires, indistinct intimations, are seen to be a large company.
— Virginia Woolf, "The Supernatural in Fiction" (1918)[32][b]
Early reviews emphasised the novella's power to frighten, and most saw the tale as a brilliant, if simple, ghost story.[33] According to scholar Terry Heller, most early reviewers saw the novel as a formidable piece of Gothic fiction.[34]
An early review of The Turn of the Screw was in The New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art, stating it was worthy of being compared to Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The reviewer noted it as a successful study of evil, referring to the ghosts' influence over the children and the governess.[35] Scholar Terry Heller notes that the children featured prominently in early criticism because the novella violated a Victorian presumption of childhood innocence.[36]
Conceptions of the text wherein the ghosts are real entities are often referred to as the "apparitionist interpretation";[37] consequently, a "non-apparitionist" holds the opposite perspective.[38] In a 1918 essay, Virginia Woolf wrote that Miss Jessel and Peter Quint possessed "neither the substance nor independent existence of ghosts".[39] Woolf did not suggest that the ghosts were hallucinations, but—in a similar fashion to other early critics—said they represented the governess' growing awareness of evil in the world. The power of the story, she argued, was in forcing readers to realise the dark places fiction could take their minds.[40]
Psychoanalytic interpretations
In 1934, literary critic Edmund Wilson posited that the ghosts were hallucinations of the governess, who he suggested was sexually repressed. As evidence, Wilson points to her background as the daughter of a country parson, and suggests that she is infatuated with her employer.[41] Before Wilson's article, another critic—Edna Kenton—had written to similar effect, but Wilson's fame as a literary critic shifted the discourse around the novella completely.[42][43][c] Wilson drew heavily from Kenton's writing, but applied explicitly Freudian terminology.[44] For example, he pointed to Quint first being sighted by the governess on a phallic tower.[45] A book-length close reading of the text was produced in 1965 using Wilson's Freudian analysis as a foundation; it characterised the governess as increasingly mad and hysterical.[46] Leon Edel, James' most influential biographer, wrote that it is not the ghosts who haunt the children, but the governess.[47]
While many supported Wilson's theory, it was by no means authoritative.[48] Robert B. Heilman was a prominent advocate for the apparitionist interpretation; he saw the story as a Hawthornesque allegory about good and evil, and the ghosts as active agents to that effect.[49] Scholars critical of Wilson's essay pointed to Douglas' positive account of the governess's character in the prologue, long after her death. Most crucially, they indicated that the governess's description of the ghost enabled Mrs Grose to identify him as Peter Quint before the governess knew he existed.[49] The second point led Wilson to "retract his thesis (temporarily)";[48] in a later revision of his essay, he argued the governess had been made aware of another male at Bly by Mrs Grose.[50][d]
Structuralism
In the 1970s, critics began to apply structuralist Tzvetan Todorov's notion of the fantastic to The Turn of the Screw.[51][52] Todorov emphasised the importance of "hesitation" in stories with supernatural elements, and critics found an abundance of them within James' novella. For example, the reader's sympathy may hesitate between the children or the governess,[53] and the text hesitates between supporting the ghosts' existence, and rejecting them.[54] Christine Brooke-Rose argued in a three-part essay that the ambiguity so frequently argued over was a foundational part of the text that had been ignored.[55] From the 1980s onwards, critics increasingly refused to ask questions about diegetic elements of the text, instead acknowledging that many elements simply cannot be known definitively.[56]
Focus shifted away from whether the ghosts were real and onto how James generated and then sustained the text's ambiguity. A study into revisions James made to two paragraphs in the novella concluded that James was not striving for clarity, but to create a text which could not be interpreted definitively in either direction.[57]
This is still a position held by many critics, such as Giovanni Bottiroli, who argues that evidence for the intended ambiguity of the text can be found at the beginning of the novella, where Douglas tells his fictional audience that the governess had never told anyone but himself about the events that happened at Bly, and that they "would easily judge" why. Bottiroli believes that this address to Douglas' fictional audience is also meant as an address to the reader, telling them that they will "easily judge" whether or not the ghosts are real.[58]
Marxist and feminist approaches
After the debate over the reality of the ghosts quietened in literary criticism, critics began to apply other theoretical frameworks to The Turn of the Screw. Marxist critics argued that the emphasis placed by academics on James' language distracted from class-based explorations of the text.[59] The children's uncle, who featured largely only in the psychoanalytic interpretations as an obsession of the governess, was regarded by some as symbolising a selfish upper-class. Heath Moon notes how he abandoned his orphaned niece, nephew, and their ancestral home to instead live in London as a bachelor.[60] Mrs Grose's distaste for the relationship between Quint and Miss Jessel was noted to be part of a Victorian dislike for relationships that were between different social classes.[61] The death of Miles and Flora's parents in India became a fixture of postcolonial explorations of the text, given the status of India as a British colony during James' lifetime.[62]
Explorations of the governess have become a mainstay of feminist writing on the text. Priscilla Walton noted that James' account of the story's origin disparaged the ability of women to tell stories, and framed The Turn of the Screw as James thus telling it on their behalf.[63] Others see James in a more positive light. Paula Marantz Cohen positively compares James' treatment of the governess to Sigmund Freud's writing about a young woman named Dora. Cohen likens the way that Freud transforms Dora into merely a summary of her symptoms to how critics such as Edmund Wilson reduced the governess to a case of neurotic sexual repression.[64]
