SOURCE: “In the ‘Other House’ of Fiction: Writing, Authority, and Femininity in The Turn of the Screw,” in New Essays on Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw, edited by Vivian R. Pollak, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 121–48.

In the following essay, McWhirter examines The Turn of the Screw within the context of James's life and oeuvre.

Although the famous debate about The Turn of the Screw—are the ghosts real? or the hallucinations of a mad governess?—has by no means exhausted itself, critics in recent decades have seemed increasingly willing to allow James's narrative something like a fundamental ambiguity, and to accept the premise that James, as one commentator puts it, wanted his readers to experience “a persistent and uncomfortable vibration between the two interpretations.”¹ In practice, however, many of these same critics have been unable to resist the impulse to resolve the discomforting uncertainties of...