TITLE:
How to Tighten the Screw?—On the Three Tensions of Narrative Strategies in “The Turn of the Screw”
AUTHORS:
Xiaotong Huang
KEYWORDS:
Narratology, “The Turn of the Screw”, Textual Interpretation
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.12 No.8,
August
15,
2025
ABSTRACT: Henry James’s novella “The Turn of the Screw” is marked by its powerful narrative techniques and suspenseful artistry, which imbue the text with ambiguity and contradiction. The mental health of the female teacher and the existence of the ghost have been subjects of ongoing debate among scholars for over a century. While the interpretation of the text is diverse, an analysis from a narrative perspective reveals that part of the controversy stems from three key transformations in the narrative mechanism: manipulation, the layered narration in the introductory sections, and the narrator’s first-person perspective that establishes authority; contradiction, the temporal inversion and contradictory content in the main manuscript, which, as a limitation of the limited first-person perspective, undermines trust in authority; and blankness, the abrupt ending and unresolved questions in the text, which, though seemingly ambiguous, are actually inevitable outcomes of the narrative process.