What is Novella?

Thus, Fagin argues, The crack of the cavil is more than than a ghost story. Defining more, however, constitutes a problem of interpretation. Is The Turn of the Screw, as Wilson argued, "a study in morbid psychological science", and are the ghosts "merely the governess's hallucinations" (Wilson 115)?

In his seminal essay "The ambiguity of Henry jumblees," Edmund Wilson proposed a Freudian variation of The Turn of the Screw, in which the governess who narrates the story is a neurotic case of sexual repression (Wilson 115). Wilson observe that no one else in the story ever support the actual appearance of the ghosts (Wilson 117). The governess believed that the children saw them, but there was ne'er any proof that they did. In addition, the housekeeper plainly insists that she did not propose them (James 76-77). However, Wilson did not avoid explanation of the fact that the governess's rendering of the startle ghosts she saw was confirmed by Mrs. Grose as Quint onward the governess had ever heard of Quint or any description of him.

Wilson argued that this occurrence is open to a double interpretation (117). Although the governess had never heard of Quint, the housekeeper had previously suggested to her that some other male had been most who "liked everyone young and pretty" (James 15). Wilson argued, therefore, that the governess ambiguously confused the approximation of this other man person with the master and his possible affaire in her (117). Thus, taking her cue from this

in her subconscious imagination, she associated herself with the former governess and conjured up an image who wore the master's change state but "who look[ed] debased" (117). As Wilson stated, the apparition had "straight, good features," he is "remarkably handsome," and his appearance is described in detail (James 18-20). On the other hand, the master's appearance has never been described; readers only chicane that he was "handsome". Thus, Wilson concluded, readers could not know how very much the vestige resembled the master, for the governess, certainly, would never tell (118).

Clearly, the phrase "I had to rule stunned subjective complications of her own" is incompatible with Wilson's argument that the psychology of the governess is think as the theme of the novella (Evans 203).

To support his psychoanalytic reading of The Turn of the Screw, Wilson noted that James did not include the novella with his other ghost stories in the collected edition of his works. Instead, he placed it between The Aspern Papers and The Liar. Wilson describes the former as a study in curiosity that becomes a mania and a menace and the second as a study of a pathological liar whose wife protects his lies against the world and acts with very much the same authority as the governess in The Turn of the Screw (Wilson 120). Therefore, Wilson concluded, "We are inclined to conclude from analogy that the story is originally intended as a characterization of the governess" (Wilson 121).

Slaughter, M. "Edmund Wilson and The Turn of the Screw." ordinal Century Interpretations of The Turn of the Screw and Other Tales: A assemblage of Critical Essays. Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970. 56-59.

Instead, he now argued that the story was create verbally at a time when James's "faith in himself had been somewhat shaken and his self-doubts were unintentionally and unconsciously incorporated into the character of the governess. Specifically, Wilson argued that Jam
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