Penny Hero (dot) Net

The Turn of the Screw: Tangled Layers of Displacement

The way Henry James subjects us to tangled layers of narrative displacement from the events in The Turn of the Screw is fascinating and disturbing because of how far it reaches into the story and how far it reaches outside its pages. Ironically, the effect of these displacements actually works to unravel and destroy the sense of safety and distance from this story as we read it and think about the implications of this carefully crafted illusion of distance.

There is no “first” layer from which to begin unraveling and examining the structure of this displacement, but we might start by looking at the character Douglas, who is the alleged first inheritor of the manuscript. His disinclination to immediately share the story is mixed with the narrator’s observation that he evidently “had something to produce” (3) suggesting that his hesitation has nothing to do with unwillingness, and more to do with the effect he intends to create. His unraveling of the story, cutting out voices seeking to jump ahead in his narrative with his reply of “that will come out” (8), resembles both a performance and the handling of something more sacred, which complicates our sense of the tale being factual.

We see Douglas through the eyes of the unnamed first narrator, who seems to highly regard writing and story-telling (connecting him with the story’s real author), as seen by his recognition of Douglas’s desire to speak, and his willingness to participate in the creation of the story by claiming to have a title (9)—of which we are never made privy to within the text.

Passing the manuscript to us adds complexity to this distance. We are told that these are an “exact transcript of my own made much later” (6). Then we finally turn another two pages, begin reading Mrs. Grose’s narration we are ready to have the rug pulled out from under us and to finally be shown the story everyone else in (and outside) the story had been making such a fuss about.

However, it’s clear that Mrs. Grose is an author and story-teller as well, emphasized by the attention to “beauty of the author’s hand” (9) in the frame. Grose—if we can suspend our disbelief in her existence for a moment—seems to consciously and strategically construct a chilling and powerful narrative. The chapter-breaks are no resting points in the narration at all but drive us forward with the very first sentence of the next chapter. Her decision to transcribe her conversations about her experiences rather than attempting to narrate the fantastic itself makes her account more literally believable, even as it amplifies our desire to see what she seems to avoid revealing and confuses our habitual drive to figure out what’s real. None of this suggests that this is a simple diary of events.

Finally, the unmentioned title of the manuscript and the published title of the actual book forms a bridge between author Henry James and the first narrator, and we can’t forget that Henry James is an actual physical person who we must believe has invented and written this entire novella. It is when we recognize this as a layer of displacement from the story like the others that we receive our biggest jolt as readers, because by extension, we are suddenly a part of the tapestry of this story, and perhaps not even a final part. (I sit at my desk now attempting to craft a convincing analysis inspired by this jolt.) All of this results in (and in my case, has already resulted in) a chilling and complicated experience of the uncanny as we attempt to unravel Henry James’ puzzle.