The Turn of the Screw

This file is a compact multi-author critical dossier, not a single essay. Its four-part structure frames, presents, and revises Eric Voegelin’s reading of Henry James: Donald E. Stanford’s prefatory note locates the intervention within decades of James criticism; Robert B. Heilman’s foreword explains the letter’s origin and critical stakes; Voegelin’s 1947 letter offers the first interpretation; and Voegelin’s 1970 postscript rethinks that interpretation within a broader philosophy of symbols, paradise, and modern closure.

Stanford introduces the dossier against the long dispute over whether James’s ghosts are real, whether the governess is mad, and whether the children are corrupt. His point is that Voegelin’s reading does not merely choose sides in the Wilsonian ambiguity debate but changes the scale of the problem.

Eric Voegelin's discussion goes far beyond the possibilities suggested by Wilson.

Heilman then supplies the intellectual scene: Voegelin read The Turn of the Screw almost at once after Heilman recommended it, responding not as a James specialist but as a philosopher of order, consciousness, and history. Heilman stresses both the proximity of Voegelin’s reading to later accounts of hubris and ambiguity and its distinctive features: the symbolic role of the employer, the problem of communication, and the non-reductive treatment of erotic and incestuous motifs.

Voegelin’s response to The Turn was immediate, enthusiastic, and at the same time profoundly critical.

The 1947 letter begins by accepting Heilman’s symbolic method while insisting that it has not gone far enough. Voegelin’s main thesis is that James’s tale is not simply a ghost story, psychological case, or moral allegory, but a symbolic drama of the soul’s attempt to govern good and evil without grace. The employer, governess, and housekeeper become figures of God, soul, and earthly common sense; the children and apparitions become the field of spiritual conflict.

I believe that The Turn of the Screw is a study, not of the mystery of good and evil only, but of this mystery in relation to the complex of consciousness-conscious-virtue.

The decisive conceptual move is Voegelin’s interpretation of the governess as the “demonically closed” soul. Her original compact with the uncle—never to appeal to him—becomes a theology of non-communication. She prevents the children’s letters from reaching him, turns prayer into performance, and converts salvation into self-salvation. Thus the “turn of the screw” is not heroic discipline but the escalation of willful virtue into destruction.

From the beginning, James has defined his study carefully as a study of the demonically closed soul; of a soul which is possessed by the pride of handling the problem of good and evil by its own means; and the means which is at the disposition of this soul is the self-mastery and control of the spiritual forces (the symbol of the governess)—ending in a horrible defeat.

The 1970 postscript is not an appendix but a major revision. Voegelin refuses to expand the earlier fragment because he no longer believes James’s symbols can be translated directly into philosophical propositions.

I did not expand the fragment, and have no intention of ever doing it, because I no longer believe that James's symbolism permits a direct translation into the language of philosophy at all.

Instead, he treats Jamesian ambiguity as intrinsic to symbolist art under conditions of “deformed reality”: modern existence has closed itself against cosmic and divine openness, replacing God, logos, and grace with the self-saving ego. Ambiguity is therefore not a technical defect but the form taken by a damaged experience of reality.

The indistinctness and ambiguity is inherent to the symbols which express deformed reality.

The postscript widens the reading into a genealogy of modern Edenic imagination, moving from Milton’s paradise through Blake, Hegel, Romantic Satanism, revolutionary nihilism, Symbolism, Nietzsche, Kafka, Eliot, Sartre, and Bloch. James’s Bly becomes one version of the modern garden: not classical tragedy, not Christian paradise, but a genteel, English, symbolist enclosure where the soul mistakes closure for innocence.

It is the symbolistically veiled, understated drama of the Puritan soul that has become genteel.

Voegelin’s final conceptual move concerns the androgynic and incest motifs. He insists that they should not be isolated as psychoanalytic data; they belong to a mythic spectrum of symbols for lost unity, now degraded into modern dreams of immanent perfection. The volume’s relevance lies here: it is at once a document in James criticism and a compact statement of Voegelin’s mature theory of symbolization, modernity, and spiritual deformation.

Henry James could be fascinated by Edenic existence, but he knew that it was the hell of living death.