PARTISAN REVIEW
Neither Ford's interpretation nor Mr. Rahv's is sufficient, how–
ever, to account for the really uncanny effectiveness of
The Turn of
the Screw.
I feel that both are valid, and that they perhaps suffi–
ciently explain the book's contemporary popularity; but it seems to
me that these two elements (supernatural possession and sexual
im–
propriety) are really secondary reasons, surface involvements of a
theme at once more comprehensive, more fundamental, and more
profound: the theme, that is, of appearance versus reality.
This theme, apparently not sufficiently serious for Mr. Wilson,
is as old as philosophy itself., An extension of it, on the ethical plane,
is the theme of good versus evil, and in fact some of the more per–
ceptive contemporary reviewers of the book discovered this meaning
in it. But in James the ethical conflict is not presented in a straight–
forward manner, as it is, say, in Blake (where a child is always a
child, a lamb always a lamb, and both are always innocent), but
with complication and irony. In
The Turn of the Screw,
with de–
vastating effect, the lambs are not lambs at all, but tigers; the chil–
dren are not really children, but, as Mrs. Grose perceives in the end,
are as old as evil itself.
The problem of appearance versus reality, which to my mind
constitutes the primary theme of the'story, James logically expresses
in the form of a paradox. Whether consciously or intuitively, he
realized the artistic importance of selecting a situation wherein the
apparent
should be innocuous, and the
real
overwhelming in its hor–
ror. The horror of the real would, indeed, be in exact proportion to
the charm of the apparent-which is why James makes his children
the very personification of youthful beauty and innocence, and pro–
vides for them such an idyllic setting. Hawthorne was preoccupied
with the same paradox; Wilde expressed it, though with infinitely
less ingenuity than James, in
The Picture of Dorian Gray;
and it
was to become almost an obsession with Pirandello. James himself
had treated it earlier, and much less grimly, in "The Liar"; and
it is interesting to note that in the definitive edition he included
The
Turn of the Screw,
not in the same volume with
Covering End
(as
these two had first been issued under the title of
The Two Magics)
or "The Jolly Corner" (another "ghost" story), but with "The
Liar."
If
one accepts
this
interpretation of the story, it is interesting
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