The Turn Of The Screw Literary Analysis

The book The Turn of the Screw by Henry James gave me a mix of emotions. I went from pitying the children, to fearing them, to feeling upset about everything they’ve encountered at such a young age. The governess demonstrates a powerful motherly characteristic that the children seemed to have needed while growing up. Thinking over to the very beginning of the book, I can rest assure that the governess would have never agreed to such a position even if it meant a loss of income to support herself and her family. The story has a lot of plot twists that lured me in every time the I felt disconnected from the context or characters. The beginning of the book felt optimistic and even friendly but it all changed as soon as Miles and Flora demonstrated signs of guiltiness. The story being told in first-person narration, made it easier to put myself in the governess’s shoes and

As much as I began to fear little Miles and Flora for knowing as much as they did and despite their darkness, I did not want either of their characters to die, nor did I consider the thought of it. For that reason, when I read the last few lines of the story, I had to reread them since I was in denial of Miles dying in such a devastating way. The fact that he was no longer able to see the apparition of Quint made me think one of two things: Quint either won over his soul or he finally detached from trying to win him over and Miles’s soul was too fragile to remain alive. Surely, I’d like to think that the young boy found his way to the light since he was borderline about to confess everything to the governess after long days of anticipation, which I infer as his attempt to wash away his sins. However, throughout the story his character is rather deceiving, making me question whether this is at all possible for him since he also never went into detail about what happened the night he went out of the house to distract the governess from catching