SOURCE: “How the Screw Is Turned: James's Amusette,” in University of Mississippi Studies in English, Vol. 4, 1983, pp. 112–31.

In the following essay, Scott explains the importance of children's games, pranks, and activities in The Turn of the Screw.

When Henry James described his novella The Turn of the Screw as “an amusette to catch those not easily caught (the ‘fun’ of the capture of the witless being ever but small …),”¹ he was not kidding. Several generations of readers have stranded themselves on what James deceptively denigrated as a “pot-boiler.” Oddly enough, critical focus has aimed at the wrong phrase (“to catch those not easily caught”), just as in reading this delightful and essentially humorous tale, readers are lured into focussing on the wrong characters. James's amusette (for that is the telling word) has caught just about everyone precisely because it is, indeed, “a plaything.”²

James's theory of art as...