The Turn of the Screw | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 29 pages of analysis & critique of The Turn of the Screw.

The Turn of the Screw | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 29 pages of analysis & critique of The Turn of the Screw.
This section contains 8,156 words
(approx. 28 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by John Lydenberg

SOURCE: “The Governess Turns the Screws,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 12, No. 1, June, 1957, pp. 37–58.

In the following essay, Lydenberg perceives the governess as an ironic savior who causes the breakdown of Flora and the death of Miles.

The interpretation of The Turn of the Screw made by Edmund Wilson in the thirties is today a dead horse, oft beaten. Every reader of the exegeses of Henry James's most famous ghost story must by now be convinced that James did not intend it as an account of the hallucinations of a frustrated, sex-starved governess.

At present it is the fashion to read the story not as a Freudian analysis but as Christian myth, suggestive of “archetypal” religious experiences. Robert W. Heilman has given the fullest exposition of this symbolic interpretation in “The Turn of the Screw as Poem,”1 an essay as typical of late forties' criticism as the Wilson interpretation...

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This section contains 8,156 words
(approx. 28 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by John Lydenberg
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Critical Essay by John Lydenberg from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.