The Turn of the Screw
Alexandra, Vidya, Leah
Chapter 21 Summary
• Mrs. Grose tells Governess that Flora is sick and terrified of the
Governess
• Flora says she did not see anything
• Governess thinks Flora will want to get rid of her
• Governess tells Mrs. Grose to take Flora away and straight to her
uncle
• Governess will stay at Bly with Miles
▫ Orders that Miles and Flora should not see each other before they leave
• Says that Miles will be on her side when the uncle comes
• Governess says that Flora has been saying shocking things about the
governess
▫ Governess says she knows where Flora picked up the language
• Mrs. Grose says the Governess’s letter was never sent
▫ They think Miles took it
• Governess says if Miles confesses, then he is saved
Chapter 22 Summary
• Governess decides to act “firm”
• Governess has a meal with Miles
Chapter 23 Summary
• Miles says he has been enjoying his freedom
• Governess says she has only stayed to be with
Miles
• Governess tells Miles it is the right time to talk
about what’s on his mind (she is skirting around
the letter issue)
• The Governess directly asks Miles if he took her
letter
Chapter 24 Summary
• Governess sees Peter Quint
• Miles confesses to stealing the letter, and Governess thinks he is saved
• Miles tells Governess that he was expelled for saying things to people that
he liked, who in turn repeated these things to people they liked
• Miles then turns, and the Governess, not wanting Miles to see Quint,
presses him against her
• Miles asks if “she” is here
• Governess responds that it is not Miss Jessel and the “coward horror” is
here
• Miles looks to where the Governess is looking, does not see the ghost and
asks, “It’s he?”
▫ Governess asks who he means
▫ Miles says, “Peter Quint—you devil!”
• Miles falls, Governess catches him and holds him with a “passion”
• Miles’ heart stops
“I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium
depended on the success of my rigid will, the will
to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that
what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against
nature. I could only get on at all by taking ‘nature’
into my confidence and my account, by treating my
monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual,
of course, and unpleasant, but demanding , after
all, for a fair front, only another turn of the
screw of ordinary human virtue”
“We continued silent while the maid was with us—
as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as some
young couple who, on their wedding-journey, at
the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter”
“He looked at me more directly, and the expression
of his face, graver now, struck me as the most
beautiful I had ever found it”
Miles: “Well—so we’re alone!”
“Oh, more or less. Not absolutely. We shouldn’t
like that!”
“No—I suppose we shouldn’t. Of course we have
the others.”
Miles:
“If we’re alone together now, it’s you that are alone
most.”
Governess to Mrs. Grose:
“If he confesses [to stealing the letter] he’s saved. If
he’s saved—”
“Then you are?”
After the Governess asks Miles about the
letter/school situation:
“He looked round him uneasily, and I had the
rare—oh, the queer!—impression of the very first
symptom I had seen in him of the approach of
immediate fear. It was as if he were suddenly
afraid of me—which struck me indeed as perhaps
the best thing to make him.”
At the beginning of chapter 24:
“Peter Quint had come into view like a sentinel
before a prison.”
“Yes—I took it”
After Miles confesses:
“…the air was clear again—and by my personal
triumph—the influence quenched?”
Miles about school:
“Well—I said things… [to] those I liked… [and]
they must have repeated them. To those they
liked.”
“There had come to me…the appalling alarm of his
perhaps being innocent. It was for the instant
confounding and bottomless, for if he were
innocent, what then on earth was I?”
Clues that Miles is unwell:
• “a perfect dew of sweat of a lovely childish forehead”
• “his little beautiful fevered face”
• “I held him to my breast, where I could feel in the
sudden fever of his little body the tremendous pulse
of a little heart.”
• “I kissed his forehead, it was drenched”
• “Pressure of his anxiety”
• “He looked in vague pain all around the top of the
room and drew his breath, two or three times over,
as if with difficulty. He might have been standing at
the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some
faint green twilight.”
• “I was blind with victory”
I was so determined to have all my proof that I
flashed into ice to challenge him.
“Whom do you mean by ‘he’?”
“Peter Quint—you devil!”
“With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he
uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss,
and the grasp with which I recovered him might
have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught
him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what
a passion; but at the end of the minute I began to
feel what I truly was that I held. We were alone
with the quiet day, and his little heart,
dispossessed, had stopped.”