SOURCE: “The Turn of the Screw as Retaliation,” in College English, Vol. 17, No. 5, February, 1956, pp. 286–88.

In the following essay, Levy investigates the relationship between James's play Guy Domville and his novella The Turn of the Screw.

Though few Jamesian texts have been the subject of a more intense critical examination than The Turn of the Screw, the significance of its closeness to the débacle of Guy Domville, which brought five years of playwriting to an inglorious end, appears not to have been well understood. The editor of James's plays, Mr. Leon Edel, has been alone in perceiving that the sequence of these two works conceals an important psychological transition. For Edel, the world of The Turn of the Screw is one “of childish fear and terror,” of regressive flight into infantile fantasy, provoked by the collapse of James's theatrical visions. “The jeering audience in St. James's had...