SOURCE: “Sexual Hysteria, Physiognomical Bogeymen, and the ‘Ghosts’ in The Turn of the Screw,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 43, No. 2, September, 1988, pp. 175–94.

In the following essay, Renner attributes the governess's detailed description of Peter Quint to nineteenth-century beliefs about the symptomatology of female sexual hysteria.

For readers and critics for whom the true—and clearly the richer—story of James's The Turn of the Screw is its dramatization of a woman's psychosexual problem and the damage it does to the children in her charge, the immovable stumbling block has always been the governess's detailed description of Peter Quint, a man dead and buried whom she has never seen. If James does not mean for readers to take Quint (and subsequently Miss Jessel) as a bona fide ghost, so the argument runs, why does he arrange things so that the only way to account for her description of him is...