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Point of View in The Turn of the Screw

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Alexander E. Jones
Alexander E. Jones*
Affiliation:
MacMurray College, Jacksonville, Ill.
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Extract

Although Henry James described The Turn of the Screw as “rather a shameless potboiler,” subsequent criticism has treated the work with more respect. As Robert Heilman has pointed out, the tale has inspired a surprising amount of discussion and speculation. Indeed, Heilman feels that James must have “hit upon some fundamental truth of experience that no generation can ignore and that each generation wishes to restate in its own terms.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 74 , Issue 1 , March 1959 , pp. 112 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959

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References

1 All quotations of the text of James's story are from the Modern Library ed. (New York, 1930).

2 “Inadequacy in Eden: Knowledge and ‘The Turn of the Screw’,” Modern Fiction Stud., iii (Spring 1957), 57–63.

3 Prefatory note to Harold C. Goddard, “A Pre-Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw,” NCF, xii (June 1957), 2.

4 Chicago Rev., x (Summer 1956), 13–29.

5 American Lit., xxix (May 1957), 207–211.

6 The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York, 1947), pp. 178–179.

7 “Preface to ‘The Aspern Papers’,” The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James, ed. Richard P. Blackmur (New York, 1934), pp. 172, 173.

8 NCF, xii (June 1957), 37–58.