SOURCE: “Narrative Structure in The Turn of the Screw: A New Approach to Meaning,” in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter, 1980, pp. 55–65.

In the following essay, Cook and Corrigan investigate how the narrative structure functions in the novella, concluding that it allows for multiple interpretations of the story.

As the subject of a critical controversy which has raged for the past forty-five years, The Turn of the Screw has by now received more scholarly attention than any other single work of James, including the major novels. Since its first publication in 1898, the novella has been read alternatively as a simple ghost story; a gothic horror tale of demonic possession; a Freudian case history of sexual neurosis, hysteria, sadomasochism, paranoia, and/or schizoid dysfunction; a poetic allegory of good and evil; a metaphoric evocation of the Victorian cultural impasse; a psychoanalytic biography of Henry James; a study of...