SOURCE: “Reflection Rendered: James's The Turn of the Screw,” in Self & Form in Modern Narrative, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, pp. 176–213.

In the following excerpt, Pecora places The Turn of the Screw within its literary and cultural context.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.

—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

I

To write, once again, of The Turn of the Screw as if anything still depended on that narrative or on any discussion of it is surely an act of presumption, perhaps even of the most wishful fantasy. For, perhaps more than any single piece of literature from the modern period, The Turn of the Screw has at this point been so overtaken by the commentary it has spawned that the “question” of the...