SOURCE: “Hysteria, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Reversal in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw,” in Henry James Review, Vol. 17, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 149–61.

In the following essay, Mahbobah addresses recent feminist perspectives on The Turn of the Screw.

The Politics of Oppositional Reversal

Recently, a number of Henry James's feminist critics have tried to rescue the heroine of The Turn of the Screw from various psychoanalytic readings which share a common gender bias in their understanding of her hysteria. While the feminist intervention into the field of psychoanalysis is necessary to correct its misrepresentations of female subjectivity, some of the new readings of James's novella mainly reverse the application of the theory, without actually moving beyond its discriminatory terms. Granted, many of the critics who utilize the methods of psychoanalysis read the governess's hysteria mainly in terms of stereotypes associated with female sexuality, and the authors of...