SOURCE: “The Turn of the Screw and the Recherche de L' Absolut,” in Henry James: Fiction as History, edited by Ian F. A. Bell, Vision Press, 1984, pp. 65–81.

In the following essay, Bell maintains that “it is not the ghost of the two dead household servants that the governess seeks to validate, but something more undenotable, an evil in the children and in the world which the ghosts can be said simply to represent.”

The preoccupation of a generation of critics with the reality status of the ghosts in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw has always seemed to me misplaced. One may grant that the spectral appearances to which the governess in the tale testifies cannot be proven to be supernaturally actual or her illusion, that we are in a condition of uncertainty over the question and that the story merits the title of ‘fantastic’ which Todorov...