SOURCE: Hoeveler, Diane Long. “Postgothic Fiction: Joyce Carol Oates Turns the Screw on Henry James.” Studies in Short Fiction 35, no. 4 (fall 1998): 355-71.

In the following essay, Hoeveler considers the relationship between “The Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly” and Henry James's “The Turn of the Screw.”

1: “suffering Is Infinite and Will Not Diminish.”—oates

Readers of James's classic gothic conundrum, “The Turn of the Screw,” have been asking themselves essentially the same questions since the tale appeared in 1898. That is, the central puzzle has been to understand the psyche of the governess, and, if she is insane, as the reader increasingly suspects, then how does one read a text that is completely occluded, inseparable from her self-serving strategies of deception and paranoia?¹ Certainly critical opinion has focused on the governess, or the children, or Douglas and the narrator—the living, in other words—in order to comprehend...