Central to The Turn of the Screw is the question of the housekeeper's reliability. The analyzes of the text from both the "apparitionist" and "non-apparitionist" points of view depend on a verdict issued by the critic on the reliability, or on the contrary on the "hysterical, compulsive, sadomasochistic" nature, as John Lydenberg said, of the double sexuality of the novel. narrator removed. Although James was eager to defend the governess's sanity in his 1908 New York retrospective preface, describing the story as "her peculiar credible exposition of such strange matters", he consistently generates ambiguity about the protagonist's credibility throughout the text. Intrinsic to a feminist reading of the tale is the question, as Peter Biedler says: “would a male narrator of the story have been so easily molded to fit so many different critical interpretations, and have been deemed 'hysterical' in so many of them? ' There is certainly structural and textual evidence to support the claim that the housekeeper's actions and account of her actions are undermined by her gender, making her the victim of what Biedler called "a subtle anti-feminism." custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay On the other hand, one can challenge this statement by suggesting that it is actually a different determining factor that causes the reader's prevailing distrust towards the ambiguous. “heroine”: from a Marxist interpretation, this would be class. Both a feminist and Marxist approach involve asking whether Henry James himself was discriminating based on gender and social status, or whether perhaps he was actually exposing the pervasive prejudices of his society. , through the medium of its readers. Is The Crackdown itself misogynistic, either a divisive attack on the proletariat by an undoubtedly bourgeois writer, or does it offer a critique of those mentalities by exploring the contemporary stigma surrounding women and men? lower classes” through the incontestable form of James's "fair and simple fable"? Of course, as James tirelessly argues, there is always the possibility of reading The Turn of the Screw simply as a 'pent-boiler', a 'jeu d'esprit', designed, as he implied to HG Wells, to attract funds and popularity in a moment of professional crisis (after Guy Domville's flop). This view suggests that the governess is a reliable accomplice in the cause of awakening "that dear, old and sacred terror", not set aside for any political purpose but rather, as the 1908 preface proposes, "intelligently neglected", leaving room for James's "effective treatment". ' with the 'mystery... of Peter Quint, Miss Jessel and the unfortunate children.' Throughout the novella, there is evidence to suggest that the governess is absurdly romantic and self-obsessed, succumbing to bouts of fantasy inspired in part by her repressed sexuality. Before the reader is allowed to hear the housekeeper's tale, the narrator describes his encounter with the master on Harley Street: "a figure that had never emerged, except in a dream or an old novel, before a girl trembling and anxious." from a rectory in Hampshire." Already James implies that the governess "dreams" of attractive, single men, from which it can be inferred that she possesses an active but internally contained sexual drive. Her gender is used to destabilize her further in the phrase "agitated girl and anxious." For a woman in her twenties, the moniker "girl" suggests that the governess still carries the immature, feminine characteristics of her youth, forcing the reader to considerdiscuss his abilities. Undoubtedly, if the central character had been a man in his twenties, he would not have been described as a "agitated and anxious boy". James makes persistent use of vocabulary that suggests romantic notions and romantically unfounded assumptions when narrating as the governess. His speech is marked by phrases such as 'when I had the fantasy...', 'I absolutely believed...', 'I began to imagine...' and 'I felt sure...'. The governess's implicit unreliability resulting from her tendency towards "fantasy" is reinforced by James's use of Gothic tropes and metafictional devices. For example, the housekeeper says of Bly: "I had a vision of a romantic castle, so placed as if it somehow took all the color out of storybooks and fairy tales, which suggests that she is painting, and quite possibly embellishing, her role as a Gothic heroine Bly's isolated setting with its "square machicolation tower" is a Gothic trope. In Chapter IX she also mentions that "the book I had in my hand was Fielding's Amelia"; her concern for fictional young women, like Amelia, who are rewarded for their virtuosity with a fairytale husband This indicates that, because of her gender, the governess's telling of the story is overshadowed by delusions of glamor and grandeur. . Critic Patricia N. Klingenberg proposes that the novella "expels the woman" because the governess' narrative is framed and reframed by two male narrators, the i-narrator and Douglas's prologue frames leads the reader to question the reliability and independence of the protagonist, if her story is, in fact, to be accompanied by male characters. The critic Edwin Fussell asks: "If a woman writes as good a novel as a man – the same novel as a man – why should she be a governess?" This question highlights a contradiction within The Turn of the Screw: although James, as he says in his preface, allows his heroine to have ""authority", which is a lot to have given her", does not allow the reader to fully trust or respect her, in part because we are forced to see her as a humble caregiver, died without noteworthy achievements outside this field. Furthermore, the governess's tale has no value in itself except as a "jeu d'esprit" which can be told by Douglas and, indeed, by James Again time, it seems suspicious that James includes the housekeeper's thought: "it would be a fascinating story to suddenly meet someone" right before his first sighting of Quint - since this reflection does not strengthen the tension of the ghost story. , from a feminist point of view one must conclude that it shows that James seeks to undermine the credibility of his protagonist by implying that, as a woman, her observations are rendered incorrect by her desperate search for male attention. On the other hand, it could be argued that James's portrayal of his heroine does not convey "a subtle anti-feminism that refuses to trust women", but rather draws strong attention to the "artificial" and "anomalous" position of the governess in Britain of the 19th century. The way in which James's fictional housekeeper is destabilized as a character and as a narrator by her gender perhaps mirrors the way in which the housekeeper in reality "blurred what was thought to be a stable distinction between domestic duty and work for money", as Lo Armstrong said. And so, since the public and domestic spheres were gendered, the governess destabilized a distinction “on which the very notion of gender seemed to depend.” Where Wilson-Goddard's critics, from a feminist perspective, come closeto the text with misogyny, as Paula Cohen puts it, by treating the narrator as “a collection of symptoms – and thus excluding her point of view,” it is possible to read the text alternatively as an assertive dramatization of the housekeeper's anxieties regarding her status as woman. The housekeeper, on her second sighting of Quint, says that she feels as if she has "looked at him for years and always known him", from which one can infer that the "erect" Quint is an externalization of the woman's distressing sexual desires. governess, who have been consistently repressed by a misogynistic society: originally within the cultural confines of her religious upbringing, and now to fulfill the ideal of the "asexual governess" who critic Poovey notes "should not be shown". obstinacy or desires itself. The governess is fixated on the sexually suspicious transgressions of her "vile predecessor" Miss Jessel, even when they are not based on hard evidence - she relentlessly insists on Mrs. Grose to reveal Miss Jessel's misdeeds: "But I'll tell you again! there was something about the boy that suggested to you that he was hiding and concealing their relationship In her compulsion to view her predecessor as sexually deviant, the housekeeper, as Sheila Teahan puts it, “displaces onto Jessel her anxiety about the precarious discursive slippage between worker and worker. the prostitute". This is emphasized at the end of Chapter are authentic, one can certainly read this line as the governess sublimating her crippling fear of becoming a "fallen woman" into the spirit of Miss Jessel. It is clear from the protagonist's almost obsessive reinforcement of her own "discretion and general high propriety" that she has become trapped in a feminine dichotomy of vice versus virtue. “Disgraced and tragic” is an apt description of the life that lay “all before” the governess if she freed her sexual desire from the shackles of patriarchy. By highlighting the literally disturbing fate of every unmarried, self-determined woman who dared to express her sexuality in the repressive period in which the novella was written, James perhaps exposes rather than supports the more than "subtle anti-feminism" of his times. Two aspects of the prologue ingeniously function as mirrors, perfectly reflecting the reader's prejudices. First, as mentioned above, almost all critics assume that the i-narrator is male. An example is critic Anthony Mazella who states that the pederastic relationship between Quint and Miles is "attributable to the [homosexual] relationship between Douglas and the narrator". Indeed, James meticulously makes no reference to the i-narrator's gender, demonstrating the unfounded and anti-feminist assumption made by his readers that, if unstated, a reliable-sounding speaker must be male. The second aspect is a consequence of the first. While much of the endless commentary on The Turn of the Screw centers on “the housekeeper's infamous question of trustworthiness,” as Teahan calls it, and critics are eager to scrutinize every word she utters for indications of subjectivity and delusion, the preamble to the story of the i-narrator who has not been to Bly nor has he ever met the housekeeper, is not questioned. The i-narrator recounts, not verbatim, Douglas' "touches" that are essential to framing the story. He says that "the first of these touches communicated that the written statement resumed the tale at a point after it had, in a sense, begun" and goes on to describe the housekeeper's journey to Harley Street, about which much…’