Storytelling Theme Analysis

The Turn of the Screw explores the relationship between storytelling and the reality stories depict: can stories be trusted as representations of reality; does the telling of a story always imply some separation or distance from reality; can stories tell something true without telling explicitly the truth? These are not questions the book explicitly answers. But an argument can be made that part of Henry James’s agenda here is to argue that stories—even fictional stories—can powerfully influence the realities they depict.

The structure of this book is a good entry point into what The Turn of the Screw says about the power stories have. The Turn of the Screw begins in one setting—the old home in England where storytellers have gathered to scare each other on Christmas Eve—and then ends in a different setting, at Bly. What happened to the storytellers? Why did Henry James leave them out of the ending? This book is a fiction, so this may seem trivial. But this change from beginning to end is not due to Henry James’s carelessness as a novelist. Rather the change can be read in light of the book’s message about stories: the story in the manuscript Douglas read from overtook the reality of the gathered storytellers the book created at the beginning. James has taken an old literary technique, called a “frame narrative”, in which stories are nested within stories by a series of storytellers, and he uses this technique to show how some stories (such as the governess’s manuscript), if they are sufficiently powerful, can overtake the frames they are placed within (such as the Christmas Eve storytelling party).

The letter the governess receives from Miles’s head-master provides another good example of how stories can complicate and influence reality. The letter is an incomplete story about Miles: it says that he has been expelled from his school but it offers no explanation, and no character in the book seems willing or able to explain to the governess why Miles may have been expelled. This mysterious letter and the stories about Miles that it implies color the governess’s relationship with Miles throughout the story. Why was he expelled? Is he evil or good? Was the letter the result of a false accusation? Because she has no evidence to answer these questions, the stories this letter spawns in her mind take place in the realm of speculation. In other words, they are fiction, but they still come to define her relationship to Miles.