SOURCE: “Floundering about in Silence: What the Governess Couldn't Say,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 26, No. 2, 1989, pp. 134–43.

In the following essay, Fleming perceives “both the governess's reactions and the ghosts, whether real or imagined, as related halves of a particular world-view or perceptual paradigm—one that informs not only this novella but much of James' entire fictional universe as well.”

The question of the reliability of the governess in The Turn of the Screw has produced one of the most developed ongoing debates in James criticism. There is on the one hand the Kenton/Wilson/Goddard school that suggests that the ghosts are imagined by the governess and hence not “real”; on the other are the critics who insist that the evidence in favor of their existence is irrefutable because objective: they are perceived by the housekeeper as well.¹ I suggest that there is in fact a...