SOURCE: “The Unfixable Text: Bewilderment of Vision in The Turn of the Screw,” in Texas Studies in Literature & Language, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter, 1978, pp. 538–51.

In the following essay, Murphy explores “some of the strategies James employs to prevent a consistent reading of the text.”

For ours is a most fictile world; and man is the most fingent plastic of creatures. A world not fixable; not fathomable!

—Carlyle, The French Revolution

Since its publication eighty years ago, The Turn of the Screw has enjoyed a double life. After Daisy Miller, perhaps James's most widely read piece of fiction, it has captivated readers, both naive and acute, as a tale of the grotesque in which a young and apparently good-hearted governess discovers the existence of ghosts at the country estate where she has been employed. Approached in a different fashion, however, it has equally captivated other readers as a revealing exemplum...