PARTISAN REVIEW
I should like, however, to contribute to the general controversy by
suggesting an interpretation which (all miraculously) has thus far,
to my knowledge, never been put forth. And there
is
one thing
which, before doing this, I
should
like to settle once and for all, and
that is the question of the reality of the apparitions in the story.
It
is
commonly supposed that Miss Edna Kenton was the first
to consider the possibility that the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss
Jessel do not really appear to the governess who tells the story, but
are instead mere hallucinations, the creatures of her own disordered
imagination.
As
a matter of fact, this possibility appears to have
occurred previously to several readers, none of whom, however, was
willing to entertain
it
very seriously or for very long. Only a few
weeks after the book was published
The Critic
observed that "the
heroine has nothing in the least substantial upon which to base her
deep and startling cognitions. She perceives what
is
beyond all per–
ception, and the reader who begins by questioning whether she is
supposed to be sane ends by accepting her conditions and thrilling
over the horrors they involve."
So far as I know, however, Miss Kenton was the first to go on
record as
not
accepting the governess's conditions, and to state posi–
tively that the ghosts are nothing more than "exquisite dramatiza–
tions of her little personal mystery, figures for the ebb and flow of
troubled thought within her mind." In her opinion James quite de–
liberately planned the story as a test of that attentiveness which he .
felt every author had a right to expect of his readers, and she offers
in support of this theory James's reference to the story (in the defi–
nitive edition preface) as "a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of
cold, artistic calculation, an
amusette
to catch those not
easily
caught." She also stresses the fact that James nowhere
states
that
the ghosts appear to anyone but the governess. On the strength,
chiefly, of these two pieces of "evidence," she rather largely con–
cludes: "Just a little wariness will suffice to disprove,
with
a single
survey of the ground, the traditional, we might almost call it a
lazy
version of the tale. Not the children, but the little governess was
hounded by the ghosts."
It
will be seen that, thus viewed,
The Turn
of
the Screw
becomes a sort of elaborate hoax, a trap for readers
lazier and less wary than Miss Kenton.
This ingenious interpretation, which, as I shall later attempt
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