SOURCE: “Exposure in The Turn of the Screw,” in Modern Philology, Vol. 78, No. 3, February, 1981, pp. 261-74.

In the following essay, Schrero contends that The Turn of the Screw should be analyzed in terms of various cultural beliefs and traditions common to the Victorian era—particularly the interactions between children, parents, servants, and governesses.

Few critics since 1925 have responded to The Turn of the Screw as its first reviewers did in 1898. Edna Kenton's 1925 essay, which was to be amplified by Edmund Wilson's three versions of “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” foreshadowed a series of ironic readings that have swelled into the mainstream of interpretation. In 1898, however, the story seemed only too clear, for reviewers complained about its horrors and confessed to being frightened by them.¹ As late as 1916, William Lyon Phelps saw in the tale “the connoting strength of its author's reticence,” which made his meaning sufficiently clear. And...