In the same way that the chastity belt drew attention to the very thing that it was designed
to obscure, the restrictive sexual mores of nineteenth century England engendered a focus on
sexual thought and expression that was as acute as it was repressive. As such, whenever sexual
expression squeezed past the cincture of its padlocked socio-economic bondage, no longer
confirming the Victorian standard, the resulting behavior was considered aberrant, or worse –
deviant.
Especially concerning women, sexual expression and pleasure became a phenomenon
closely guarded and controlled through the agencies of Church, marriage, and medicine. These
three institutions formed the cornerstone of control over women’s sexuality which was seen as a
force of nature that, for the good of society as well as the health of the individual woman,
required strict censure. In fact, the disease then known as hysteria was considered to be a female
problem, a “consequence of women’s nature,” and was diagnosed as an imbalance in the
relationship between womb/genitals and sexual desire/mental state (Perrot, 625). This
correlation, of course, could not be proven, but that did not impede belief in its efficacy. As such,
the prudent woman who wanted both to function well in society as well as to avoid the madness
that supposedly came from indulgence in libidinous imaginings, pruned her thoughts, repressed
her sexuality, and thereby created the circumstances that twist natural impulse into unconscious,
latent behavior.
The novella, The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, is an example in literature of what
Freud would identify as latent female sexual expression. But even in the initial phase of a
psychoanalytic reading of the text, we encounter other preponderances that invite the use of
Queer Theory to adequately explain all of the uncovered repressed allusions. For, while women’s
sexuality was seen as a force of nature to be controlled, homosexuality was vilified as an
abomination of nature to be expunged. The homosexual was considered to be morphologically
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determined with physical characteristics identifying him as “a new kind of monster, an animal
whose sexual activities resembled those of a dog” (Perrot, 640). Discovery of homosexual
behavior, or even the mere accusation of such, often led to prison and/or social ostracism (Perrot,
642).
As a result, during this era it was common practice to speak and write in euphemisms, to
make allusion to sexual matters without directly identifying the topic. In this way, when a person
wanted to communicate sexual meaning, he or she did so using coded language. The listener – or
reader – who understood the coded context in this delicate use of language was “in the know.”
But, if the listener/reader did not understand the coded meaning, then the communication would
be considered exclusively for its obvious, superficial meaning behind which the speaker, having
said nothing untoward on the surface, remained safe from discovery. When authors write in this
manner, therefore, they have two audiences: a primary audience that perceives only the obvious
meaning of the text, and a secondary audience that sees the same obvious meaning but also
catches the presence of imbedded sexual content. It is my contention that Henry James
intentionally employed this devise of hidden sexual allusion when he wrote The Turn of the
Screw in 1897. This is a story whose manifest content, that of the ghost story popular at this
time, conceals the latent content of both heterosexual and homosexual expression. In other
words, the subtext of The Turn of the Screw is the sexual repression of both the main character,
the Governess, and the author, Henry James.
This analysis starts with the outer shell, the manifest or superficial text of “ghost story,”
so that it can be peeled back to uncover the latent sexual material that James intends for his
secondary audience. Excluding the prologue for the moment (to be taken up later in this
discussion), we have the first hand account of a governess who has been given full charge of two
children living at a large country estate called Bly. The Governess sees two ghosts, male and
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female, identified as former employees of the estate, and she determines that these phantasms are
bent on diabolical deeds concerning the children. The Governess attempts to prevent the ghosts
from getting hold of the children, but, in the end, the male ghost, Quint, seems to have had the
upper hand in this battle when the boy, Miles, dies in the arms of the Governess.
What is not accounted for in this summation, however, is James’s elusive style in telling
this tale. James leaves gaps in the text at the precise moments where information is most wanted.
By doing this, he is not just building intrigue and suspense in the reader; he is inciting
speculation. And the inferences he embroiders throughout the text’s plot and language foster
speculation that his gaps are designed to highlight, by the very act of obscuring, the hidden
sexual content. For example, there is never anything specifically stated about the ghost’s actual
intentions with the children. However, there is always vague, but damning, innuendo about the
relationship Quint and Miss Jessel – when living – had had with each other and with the children.
Furthermore, the Governess’s private thoughts concerning the children and her employer, whom
she calls “the master,” seem incredible and out of proportion to her actual relationship to them:
she has deeply romantic fantasies about her employer, despite having met him briefly only twice,
and she lavishes on the children an adoration that reads like the language of a lover caught up in
full blown obsession. James acknowledged the oddity of his text when, “in speaking about “The
Turn of the Screw” in the collected edition of his work, [he] . . . recalled telling himself ‘Only
make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough . . . and his sympathy (with the children)
and horror (of their false friends) will supply them quite sufficiently with all the particulars’”
(Lewis, xv). By this, James could be seen as presaging the Reader Response movement. It is
much more likely that he is prompting his Victorian (and post-Victorian) readers to access,
consciously, or unconsciously, their own unspoken knowledge of the unspoken subject of desire,
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for what could be more evil in the nineteenth century than “the thing” that dare not be put into
words.
So, just beneath the manifest content of the ghost story, we discover the latent content of
the Governess’s repressed sexuality. Using the first person narrative voice of his main character,
James slowly, but steadily, exposes the inner workings of the Governess’s mind creating the
impression of sexual repression. He then compounds this with the presence of the ghosts, for it is
never clear whether they are real or imagined as the Governess is the only one who sees them.
However, this very fact, her solitary experience of the “living detestable dangerous presence” of
Quint and Miss Jessel, suggests her singular connection to them. Therefore, James’s secondary
audience communication is made by inducing the reader to see the Governess’s sexual repression
as (James, 1) an internal projection of intense affection by which she objectifies her male
employer and his children, and (James, 2) an external projection, in the form of evil, homoerotic
ghosts, representing her abhorrence for her own sensual nature.
The Governess’s fascination with her employer begins at their first meeting and is later
continued in her imagination. Her employer is described as “a bachelor in the prime of life . . .
handsome, bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind.” This is innocuous enough, until the
description of him turns Romantic characterizing him in terms of the eternal: “such a figure had
never risen, save in a dream or an old novel” (James, 7). And the Governess, standing alone in
the presence of this exaggerated specimen of manhood, is alluded to in the metaphoric image of
the “fluttered anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage,” evoking female innocence enforced via
parochial chastity. In this way, womanhood is remanded to “girl”-hood and marked by the
fluttering anxiety of sexual responsiveness being suffocated. The language describing her second
and last meeting with “the master,” paints her as having “succumbed” to the “seduction
exercised by the splendid young man,” as having “engaged” to take up his offer of employment,
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and as having felt “already . . . rewarded” (James, 8 – 9) by his merely thanking her while
holding her hand.
There is a class distinction between them that presupposes the possibility of any marital
engagement, but which does not prevent the young governess from fantasizing along lines of
related romantic possibilities. She strolls the grounds “with a sense of property that amused and
flattered” her such that it gave “pleasure – if he ever thought of it – to the person to whose
pleasure [she] had yielded.” She even expects that her remarkable disposition “would more
publicly appear” bringing her closer to his attention. From these thoughts she imagines a
“charming story” in which her path leads her to “someone [who] would stand before [her] and
smile and approve” (James, 19). Coupled with this thought, is the idea that “he should know” and
that “the only way to be sure he knew would be to see it, and the kind light of it, in his handsome
face.” It is at this moment that she sees the ghost, and, tellingly, she has “the sense that her
imagination had . . . turned real” (James 19). In other words, this knowingness that she craves
and fantasizes, with its secondary audience italicization, is now being projected into a three
dimensional reality right in front of her, for in that first moment of seeing Quint’s face, it is,
initially, the very same “kind” face she had just been imagining. However, this projection of
Other is vaguely threatening in the way that he “markedly fixed her” by locking eyes with her,
and in the way that she had the “feeling [of] some challenge between us” (James, 21) The male
figure is therefore, not just a projection of the Governess’s mind, and not merely the embodiment
of her own sexual yearning, but, by its threatening disposition, a function of her mind trying to
repel romantic thoughts that would naturally lead to libidinous inclinations.
Doubts about the veracity of this claim can be put more to rest by considering the
Governess’s quick decision to place herself in the exact spot where the apparition, soon to be
identified as Quint’s ghost, made his second visitation. Dashing outside to stand in the place
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where the ghost had been looking in through the window can be read as her inclusion into his
space, into his identity, and, therefore, illustrating her alignment with his purpose. Standing in
his space acknowledges their shared psychological space. She even refers to this identification
with the ghost when she states “it was as if I had been looking at him for years and had known
him always” (James, 25). Later, on her third encounter with him, she states, “He knew me as
well as I knew him” (James, 48).
An argument against this notion of unified psychological space could be launched using
the Governess’s conclusion that Quint was not looking at her through the window but, rather,
that “He had come for some one else” (James, 25). But there is no contradiction here; Quint, as a
projection of the Governess’s mind, is not focused on the Governess because her sexual focus
has shifted elsewhere. If we follow his gaze we discover the Governess’s focus, and when we
consider her fear of him, her loathing, we come closer to understanding her unconscious state of
self-reprehension, self-loathing.
Her sexual focus is soon revealed in just a few pages with Mrs. Grosse’s admission that,
in life, Quint’s relationship with young Miles was peculiar to Quint’s “own fancy.” As always,
allusions substitute for direct accusation leaving the reader to surmise the meaning of her
statement that “[Quint] liked to play with him . . . to spoil him . . . Quint was much too free”
(James, 32). What this has to do with the Governess is revealed in almost every one of her
evaluations of Miles and Flora. Almost all of her references to the children take on the same tone
of being stricken with an intense and obsessive love. While her language is equally hyperbolic
with both children, she is partial to Miles and so her initial impression of him will serve here as
the basis for establishing her state of mind:
He was incredibly beautiful . . . everything but a sort of passion of tenderness for
him was swept away by his presence. What I then and there took him to my heart
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for was something divine that I have never found to the same degree in any child
– his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love. (James, 17)
As mentioned earlier, her emotions for the children are always at a fever pitch. Her language is
that of the worshipper; she extols them for their physical beauty as well as their angelic
dispositions. Assuming that they are not truly divine, but only as mortal as she, her adoration
borders on a type of beatific ecstasy and is out of proportion with the fact that she has only just
met them. If we conclude that her desire for intimacy with her employer, repressed and turned
into fantasy, is similar in nature to her expressiveness for the children, we might further conclude
that this exaggerated emotional state is the misplacement and projection of her sensual feelings
for the master onto the children, as if, through them, she can achieve closeness with him.
Furthermore, this longing now turned pedophilic, forces her to create Quint as an outside force
embodying her inappropriate desires, which, in him, she can openly resist.
It is at this point that we must make the natural slid from psychoanalysis into Queer
Theory in order to address the fact that Quint’s desire for Miles is not just pedophilic but
pederastic. In addition, there is the question of Miss Jessel. Aligned with Quint, Miss Jessel is a
sub-division of the Governess’s psycho-sexual projection of Quint; Miss Jessel is focused on
little Flora in the same way that Quint is focused on Miles. In this way, the Governess’s
inappropriate adoration of the children is halted by the unholy/unnatural stigma of
homoeroticism in the form of both ghosts. In effect, she is haunted and harassed by her own
misplaced, inappropriate sexuality.
Introducing this idea of an imbedded layer of homoerotic content in The Turn of the
Screw invites further scrutiny – not of the Governess, but of Henry James. Henry James,
architect of the coded, latent sexuality of his main character, similarly wrote a curious prologue
that, as far as the ghost story is concerned, offers dubious contribution. Arguably, James is
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simply setting the stage with a story-within-a-story structure, using Douglas’s mysterious
reluctance to tell his scary tale as a means for creating an atmosphere that ominously
foreshadows the haunting of Bly. But couldn’t the same effect be achieved more easily and
effectively as an introductory element of the actual ghost story? Certainly any expositional
information about the Governess could have been included in the main body of the story. So, if
not an enhancement of the main body of the text, what is James’s purpose with the prologue?
There are several outstanding elements in the prologue that come into better focus
through the Queer Theory lens. First, there is Douglas’s reluctance to tell the ghost story that he
obviously wants to share – or else why did he bring it up? Second, there is the fact that he will
not just tell the story, he must read it. But the manuscript must be sent for since it is at another
location under lock and key. And third, there is the strange implication that the narrator and
Douglas have an understanding that supercedes the normal relationship with an acquaintance or
friend.
Starting with the last item, the implied relationship between Douglas and the narrator, we
have between them the kind of wink-wink-nudge-nudge communication reflecting the same
secondary audience relationship of James with his reader. Douglas and the narrator maintain a
certain repartee in the dialogue that anticipates the reading of the story; it is a brand of bantering
communication that none of the other guests share, not even with each other. And yet the actual
relationship between Douglas and the narrator is wholly undefined. There is something between
them, for Douglas, we are told, leaves to the narrator upon death the only copy of this “dreadful,”
secret story. Furthermore, there is the curious exchange between them in which Douglas implies
that the narrator, above all the others present during their exchange, would understand him –
which then proves true:
8
“You’ll easily judge why when you hear.’
“Because the thing was such a scare?”
He continued to fix me. “You’ll easily judge, “he repeated: “you will.”
I fixed him too. “I see. She was in love.” (James, 5)
Again, italics emphasizing a secondary audience. Stating that love is at the heart of the situation
prompts the thought that the physical expression of love may not have been far off. But more
importantly, why is he the one in the room who “will easily judge.” The greater implication is
that the two of them, Douglas and the narrator, have a relationship that is peculiar to unspoken
love or, at the very least, that they share a common experience in which certain kinds of “love”
go unspoken.
Following this is the question of the title of the story. When one of the female guests asks
for the title and Douglas says he doesn’t have one, how is it that the narrator so easily answers,
“Oh I have!” (James, 9)? By this response, the narrator clearly understands something of the
context of the story even though he has never heard its content. More directly stated, Henry
James is coding into his narrative a homosexual relationship between the narrator and Douglas,
or – better yet – he is giving us two characters who, having just met, recognize each other for
their mutual but hidden sexual persuasion. By this latter reading of their relationship, we have
the same recognition of coded behavior and language between the two characters that James is
expecting to have with certain members of his readership.
Add to this the fact that the ghost story cannot just be told. It must be sent for. On top of
this, it is locked up and the key must be sent to release it. When it arrives, it is bound in a “faded
red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album” (James, 9). Why all of this? Because James
is evoking the silent proliferation of pornographic material. This simple ghost story is treated by
Douglas as if it were some sort of dirty little secret, like underground literature that has to be
securely locked up and kept separate from the everyday commerce of life. There is even the
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expression of relief from the narrator that certain guests have left the house prior to the reading
of the tale, implying that it is material not suitable for everyone. And the physical description of
the book has the story wrapped in proper Victorian finery, while its lusty color betrays the torrid
secrets held within. In essence, this is the same effect that we find with The Turn of the Screw – a
Victorian ghost story concealing the ragging sexuality of a young governess.
Lastly, Douglas’s reluctance in telling the story that he himself proposes is tantamount to
the homosexual struggle of “coming out.” Does he reveal the contents of his story? How will it
be received? It is clearly troubling to him in a way that is deeply personal. The implication is that
he, as a child, was in love with the Governess when in her charge, but that is what the guests
surmise; he never states definitively what it is that disturbs him. The fact is that, like the
governess, his actions are out of proportion to the situation at hand. There does not seem to be
anything in the house, nor in the story itself, to cause the degree of internal disruption that
Douglas is obviously experiencing. It is as if he were about to reveal something that he had long
ago hidden about himself. Again, the implied relationship with the narrator comes to the fore: “It
was to me in particular that he appeared to propound this – appeared almost to appeal for aid not
to hesitate. He had broken a thickness of ice, the formation of many a winter; had had his reasons
for a long silence” (James, 4). Douglas’s behavior and accompanying description is uncannily
evocative of a man struggling to reveal his homosexuality. He is also, then, James’s devise for
focusing our attention on the unspoken, on the forbidden. James, via Douglas, is not just building
suspense by delaying what is promised, he is signaling the reader that what Douglas will not
speak of openly must be surmised from his actions and from the hesitation of his words. James is
enticing us to use our imaginations so that, if we are willing to be his secondary audience, the
thing unspoken becomes the only subject worth discussing. And, to the extent that Douglas
insists on the primacy of the written word, identification with the author seems intentional.
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In conclusion, it is worth mentioning that, of course, without new revelatory documents
that authenticate the sexual and homosexual content here described in The Turn of the Screw, all
analysis in this area is more conjecture than proof. However, the suggestive use of language to
convey the experience of sexuality, especially in this period, cannot be understated, for “to
ignore the importance of language is to run the risk of anachronism.” It was commonplace for
“physical love [to be] a constant obsession of fiction and poetry” but only by this method of
coding, whereby
Obscenity, omnipresent yet hidden in the depths of the text, forced readers to
decode the message as they read, thus heightening the pleasures of transgression.
Ellipses, litotes, periphrasis, and metaphor called the imagination into play.
Descriptions of sexual climax are just a case in point. In this literature men “took’
women, while women “gave” themselves. “Pleasure” – meaning sometimes
coitus, sometimes orgasm – consisted of “indescribable ecstasies,” “extraordinary
delights,” “frenzied, almost convulsive transports.” Novels explored, or at any
rate touched on, the secrets of sexual life, once the province of libertine literature.
They alluded to frigidity and impotence and delighted in homosexual scandals.
(Perrot, 578)
Clearly, Henry James did not invent the use of the euphemistic expression for sexual content, but
he did ingeniously turn this device into a method of communication intricate enough to get his
story published while conveying to his secondary audience the aberrant results of female
sexuality denied . . . and possibly his own.
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Bibliography
Cohen, Paula Marantz. “Freud’s Dora and James’s Turn of the Screw: Two treatments of the
Female ‘Case.’” Criticism. Vol. 28, no.1, 73-87 (Winter 1986).
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction. By Henry James. New York:
Bantam Books, 1981.
Lewis, R. W. B. Introduction. The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Fiction. By Henry James.
New York: Bantam Books, 1981.
Perrot, Michelle, ed. A History of Private Life, Vol. IV: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great
War. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1990.
Thormann, Janet. “The Unconscious and the Construction of the Child.” Literature and
Psychology. Volume 42, No. 4, 16-35 (1997).
Wegenknecht, David. “Here’s Looking at You, Peter Quint: ‘The Turn of the Screw,’ Freud’s
‘Dora,’ and the Aesthetics of Hysteria.” American Imago. Vol. 55. No. 4, 423-458
(1998).
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Henry James,
Encoded Sexuality,
And The Turn of the Screw
Ronald Drewes
12/2/02
Eng 638 – Critical Approaches to Literature
Dr. Solomon
13
Note:
Taking your qualification about research versus original analysis, I have entertained no more
psychoanalytic readings of The Turn of the Screw beyond the limited reading I had already done
just prior to visiting you at your office. I have included in my bibliography the journal articles I
referenced, but I have run into a problem: there is one detail of my analysis that I am suspicious I
might have read elsewhere, at least in part. There were only a few articles that I read (and not
even fully) plus the general background information that one acquires from doing research, yet in
retracing my steps, I have not been able to identify a source for this specific idea.
The piece of analysis in question is my argument that the Governess psychologically identifies
with Quint when she stands in his place looking in through the window in Chapter IV (see p. 6).
The Wegenknecht article discusses cross-gendered identification between the Governess and the
children, and of the children with each other, in connection with Chapter X when Miles goes
outside of the house in the dark and his sister observes him from her bedroom window. In the
article, this scene is referred to as “the window scene.” It may be that this question of identity
prompted my own separate conclusion that the Governess’s physical alignment at the window
with the ghost – in the earlier “window scene” – is an expression of her identification with him
and, therefore, indicative of her psychosis. But I do want to acknowledge the possibility that I
had read this very argument, or some version of it, in my preliminary research. With the
exception of this one point, the specific details and conclusions of my argument, which rely on
historical and linguistic contexts, are original . . . as far as I know.
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