Henry James: Master of Perception (Turn of the Screw)

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Henry James: Master of Perception Henry James cleverly played with his readers’ perceptions in The Turn of the Screw, deliberately making his story ambiguous, thus allowing the book to tell several different stories at once. It is designed to make people think about it, pull it apart and reconstruct it. Henry James writes in a purposely elusive manner, challenging readers to make their own decisions about what story the book is actually telling. Perception is not just how we see reality; it refers to a sense of awareness and understanding; a recognition or appreciation of moral, psychological or aesthetic qualities (dictionary.com). Readers of the nineteenth century had themselves a ghost story, which satisfied the fashionable fascination with Gothic horror. However when Edmund Wilson posited in his 1934 article that The Turn of the Screw was ambiguous, it caught the interest of countless academics, who started to read it with a newer mindset (O’Gorman 125). Tellingly, when James put his collection of well over a hundred stories in order, he didn’t put The Turn of the Screw with the other ghost stories; he put it between two ‘psychological tales’ (Seymour). James filters the story through several narrative frames to give the effect of ambiguity. Can we trust the recount of the implied James (Allen 74)? Can we trust the version of the story told by Douglas? What about the governess? We read the story as a second-hand account of a story told at a party some years earlier. To thicken the plot, the narrator at the party, Douglas, didn’t experience the story first hand either. He heard it from the governess – the main protagonist – many years after it is supposed to have happened. This ‘Chinese whispers’ method of telling the story leads us to question the reliability not only of our own perception and that of the protagonist, but that of Douglas and our narrator

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