Peter G. Beidler

Approaches to teaching Henry James's Daisy Miller and The turn of the screw

Now at ninety-three volumes, this popular MLA series addresses a broad range of literary texts. Each volume surveys teaching aids and critical material and brings together essays that apply a variety of perspectives to teaching the text. In these essays, experienced teachers discuss approaches and methods they have found effective in keeping classroom discussions lively.

A Critical History of The Turn of the Screw

The fundamental question dealt with in the scholarship on The Turn of the Screw is how real the ghosts are. Are Peter Quint and Miss Jessel real in the sense that they are spirits of the dead come back to haunt the living? Or are they real only in the sense that the governess has hallucinations that make them seem real to her? Do they haunt the children or do they haunt only the governess’s troubled imagination? Virtually every book and article on The Turn of the Screw — and there have been hundreds — deals at least indirectly with that question. It is almost impossible to read the story without taking sides and almost impossible to approach the story critically without knowing where one stands on it. Indeed, that question — and the fun that scholars and their students have had debating it — has elevated to star status what might otherwise have been seen as a rather ordinary James story. The two basic readings are so radically different and so apparently mutually exclusive that it is amazing that both sides have agreed on one essential fact: that The Turn of the Screw is a wonderfully successful story. It is an amazingly fine creepy, scary, soul-shuddering ghost story or, alternatively, it is an amazingly fine psychological case study of a neurotic young woman. The fact that the two readings seem mutually exclusive — how, after all, can a woman be both sane and insane, how can ghosts be both real and imaginary? — has not prevented a third position from emerging in recent years: that The Turn of the Screw is at once both a ghost story and a psychological study.

A Turn down the Harbor.

To my astonishment, I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! Why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it. Thoreau, “Walden”

An Old-Fashioned Form of the Zulu Tongue: A Nineteenth-Century Chaucer Allusion

In the context of a remark about the dialects of the Zulu language in his novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885), H. Rider Haggard made a hitherto unacknowledged allusion to Chaucer.

Marxist Criticism and The Turn of the Screw

To the question “What is Marxist criticism?” it may be tempting to respond with another question: “What does it matter?” In light of the rapid and largely unanticipated demise of Soviet-style communism in the former USSR and throughout Eastern Europe, it is understandable to suppose that Marxist literary analysis would disappear too, quickly becoming an anachronism in a world enamored with full market capitalism.

Reader-Response Criticism and The Turn of the Screw

Students are routinely asked in English courses for their reactions to texts they are reading. Sometimes there are so many different reactions that we may wonder whether everyone has read the same text. And some students respond so idiosyncratically to what they read that we say their responses are “totally off the wall.”

Introduction: Biographical and Historical Contexts

On April 15, 1843, Henry James was born into what was to be one of the most intellectually powerful families in the United States. The original James emigrated from Ireland shortly after the American Revolution. He married three times (his first two wives died relatively young) and fathered thirteen children, among them a son named Henry, born and reared in Albany, New York. That Henry, usually referred to now as Henry Sr. because of his more famous son of the same name, eventually settled in New York City with his wife, Mary. There they had five children: William (1842–1910), Henry Jr. (1843–1916), Garth Wilkinson (1845–1883), Robertson (1846–1910), and Alice (1848–1892). Henry Jr., the author of The Turn of the Screw, is the subject of this sketch, but to understand his life we need to know something about the siblings with whom he grew up and with whom he corresponded for most of their lives.1

Psychoanalytic Criticism and The Turn of the Screw

It seems natural to think about literature in terms of dreams. Like dreams, literary works are fictions, inventions of the mind that, although based on reality, are by definition not literally true. Like a literary work, a dream may have some truth to tell, but, like a literary work, it may need to be interpreted before that truth can be grasped. We can live vicariously through romantic fictions, much as we can through daydreams. Terrifying novels and nightmares affect us in much the same way, plunging us into an atmosphere that continues to cling, even after the last chapter has been read — or the alarm clock has sounded.

Feminist Criticism and The Turn of the Screw

Feminist criticism comes in many forms, and feminist critics have a variety of goals. Some are interested in rediscovering the works of women writers overlooked by a masculine-dominated culture. Others have revisited books by male authors and reviewed them from a woman’s point of view to understand how they both reflect and shape the attitudes that have held women back.

Deconstruction and The Turn of the Screw

Deconstruction has a reputation for being the most complex and forbidding of contemporary critical approaches to literature, but in fact almost all of us have, at one time, either deconstructed a text or badly wanted to deconstruct one. Sometimes when we hear a lecturer effectively marshal evidence to show that a book means primarily one thing, we long to interrupt and ask what he or she would make of other, conveniently overlooked passages, passages that seem to contradict the lecturer’s thesis. Sometimes, after reading a provocative critical article that almost convinces us that a familiar work means the opposite of what we assumed it meant, we may wish to make an equally convincing case for our former reading of the text. We may not think that the poem or novel in question better supports our interpretation, but we may recognize that the text can be used to support both readings. And sometimes we simply want to make that point: texts can be used to support seemingly irreconcilable positions.