SOURCE: “Jamesian Parody, Jane Eyre, and The Turn of the Screw,” in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 13, No. 4, Fall, 1983, pp. 61-78.

In the following essay, Petry claims that with The Turn of the Screw James wrote a parody of the popular novel Jane Eyre, portraying his own narrator (the unnamed governess) as an almost exact parody of Brontë's famous female protagonist.

Ever since it was first published in 1898, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw has received a phenomenal amount of critical attention and popular acclaim; and no small portion of this perennial interest is due to the fact that there are basically two ways in which to read the story: (1)that the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel really do appear to the governess (and that, consequently, she is indeed a reliable narrator); or (2)that the ghosts do not exist, and the governess is deluded—perhaps...