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The genius of Henry James’s masterpiece, The Turn of the Screw, lies in the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the text. The question of whether the ghosts are real or imagined by the governess, for instance, has been the subject of much speculation over the years, and a good case can be made to support either position on this matter. However, given the unreliable narrators of this story, and the character of the governess’s confidant, Mrs. Grose, there is a great deal of evidence that the ghosts are imagined. Yet the strongest evidence that the ghosts are not real stems from the fertile imagination of the mentally unstable governess. First of all, the story is told from the perspective of several unreliable narrators, including the governess. The setting is established by an unnamed narrator, who relates to the reader that a group of friends at Christmas time are exchanging ghost stories and competing with each other to tell the most chilling tale. As Douglas tells his guests, for example, “If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children - ?” (479). From Douglas’s manuscript, which is written in the hand of his sister’s former governess, who died twenty years earlier, the unnamed narrator has transcribed his own manuscript. And finally, twenty years after the death of Douglas, it is the initial unnamed narrator’s manuscript we are privy to, but it is written from the governess’s point of view. Because it has changed hands so many times, the truthfulness of the story is highly suspect. For example, when the governess tries to describe to Mrs. Grose the man she saw in the tower, she tells her, “He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an actor,” but then she adds, “I’ve never seen one, but so I suppose them” (495).
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