ABSTRACT

Always precocious, The Turn of the Screw’s Miles and Flora devise an almost Freudian method to pry intimate details from their governess. In order to conceal what they know (or don’t know) about the sexual secrets of her predecessor, they shift the focus to her history, feigning sympathy in an effort to glean details that will support a diagnosis and prove her hysteria:

They had a delightful endless appetite for passages in my own history to which I had again and again treated them; they were in possession of everything that had ever happened to me, had had, with every circumstance, the story of my smallest adventures and of those of my brothers and sisters and of the cat and the dog at home, as well as many particulars of the whimsical bent of my father, of the furniture and arrangement of our house and of the conversation of the old women of our village. There were things enough, taking one with another, to chatter about, if one went very fast and knew by instinct when to go round. They pulled with an art of their own strings of my invention and my memory; and nothing else perhaps, when I thought of such occasions afterwards, gave me so the suspicion of being watched from under cover. It was in any case over my life, my past, and my friends alone that we could take anything like our ease. (51)