The Turn Of The Screw Stylistic Analysis

The female malady. This term has been used to describe the affliction of being a woman. According to Elaine Showalter’s aptly named The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980, “Women, within our dualistic systems of language and representation, are typically situated on the side of irrationality, silence, nature, and body, while men are situated on the side of reason, discourse, culture, and mind” (Showalter 3-4). Henry James’s governess in The Turn of the Screw exemplifies a woman represented in exactly this way. Subtle clues in the novella’s language and organization lead to conclusions to be drawn about exactly how stable the governess’s mental state is, and, thus, how credible her claims of seeing ghosts are. The Turn of the Screw is not, however, a ghost story; instead, it acts as a psychological analysis of the root and progression of the decline of one woman’s psyche. The governess stands as an example of a woman silenced by men, cut from interpersonal communication, who must still answer to man’s authority; hence, a buildup of suppressed emotions leads to hysteric behaviors and other qualities characteristic of the female nervous disorder. The Turn of the Screw’s author, Henry James was all too familiar with female psychological disorders. In fact, his sister, Alice James, suffered from bouts of depression and even attempted suicide (Beidler 4). After her death in 1892, Alice’s journals chronicling her emotional struggles were discovered and later published by Henry and his older brother, psychologist William James. Because of his personal insight into the female psyche, along with his knowledge of the psychological community’s views towards “the female malady,” Henry James was able to construct an ambiguously-stated social commentary based on the larger male population’s interpretation of what was “wrong” with women. James wrote, “The masculine tone is passing out of the world. […] it is a feminine, nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age” (qtd in Showalter 146). James’ words indicate the rise of the notion of the female hysteric, or the equation of “feminine” with nervous and hysterical tendencies, which James does not necessarily appear to sympathize with. Thus, he crafts the governess’s …show more content…
The introduction also, however, implies that the governess’s emotional problems are caused by a man. When the governess is introduced, she is described by Douglas, the bearer of the governess’s story, as “the youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson” (James 6). This immediately invokes an image of a woman who is of simple upbringing and is thus naïve and susceptible to psychological influences. She meets her potential employer, who is described as “a bachelor in the prime of life[.] [S]uch a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel, before a fluttered anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage” (James 7). He is also described as having “charming ways with women” (James 7). Immediately afterwards, the framing scene foreshadows the governess’s impending doom by saying, “[His type] never, happily, dies out” (James 7), meaning that “his type” will forever affect the governess. This is evidenced by the statement Douglas makes regarding the governess’s tale of her experience: “The story’s written. It’s in a locked drawer—it has not been out for years” (James 4). When he had “broken a thickness of ice, the formation of many a winter” (James 4), he metaphorically reveals the secret that the governess had kept hidden away for so many