SOURCE: Fleming, Bruce E. “Floundering About in Silence: What the Governess Couldn't Say.” Studies in Short Fiction 26, no. 2 (spring 1989): 135-43.

In the following essay, Fleming considers the supernatural elements in Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.

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 way of perceiving The Turn of the Screw which mediates between the two sides of this debate, seeing both the governess's reactions and the...