The Turn of the Screw Essay -- Literary Analysis, Henry James

Superfici onlyy, Henry throngs The Turn of the Screw seems to reinforce the status quo of American books as mannish, whereby work force are viewed as having provide everywhere women loss women to become mere objects. James creates a nameless fe manly title-holder whose myth is told through the guise of a male narrator. She becomes an object viewed by Douglass audience and is used simply as means for the subjugate on Harley Street to avoid being bothered by his charges. She is and then set up as nave and love-struck, willing to do alone active anything, including risking her declare sanity, for the sake of keeping the winner undisturbed. However, on close-hauled examination, James actually creates a novella that subverts the handed-down idea of men having agency over women as it is the governess who has the final word in her story, not the male Douglas, and it is the male heir Miles who becomes the scapegoat leaving the governess free, awfully keen and nice (James 24) .Jamess au naturel(p) frame tale creates thwarting and confusion still his experiment with form also leave outs attention to what has mostly been left unconscious. Through Douglass initial telling of the governesss story she is reduced to a nameless object that they all raptly listen about rather than listen to. While at the start, Douglas does have power over the governesss story, in the end it is the governess who has the final word and Douglas, who disappears after nevertheless the first seven pages, is never to be heard from again. James relinquishes power to the governess and allows her to participate as there is no need to return to the male voice once she takes over. Furthermore, as the governess does remain nameless throughout her own narrative this hardly is a power issues as both the master on... ...til finally the air was clear (116-117). In this way the governess is able to drive away the roles of passive/female and active/male as she denies Quint the power of hi s gaze and instead forces him to be the object of her gaze.Through his distortion of traditional male dominated structures and ideas, James is able to not only draw attention to the inequality of mens power over women but he also uses the same devices to subvert this binary opposition. Through a distortion of the assumed patriarchal order the governess is able to adopt male characteristics in order to wrest back some of the power ab initio taken from her. Whether consciously or unconsciously Jamess unfinished frame, disturbing death of Miles, and the disappearance of Quints ghost all point to a hidden power within the governess allowing her to survive wide after her weaker male counterparts.