The Unknown of the Known in the Unknown in ‘The Turn of the Screw’

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The True Uncanny Experience in ‘The Turn of the Screw’

There is something peculiar in familiarity in the unfamiliar. It’s a strange, but very much needed, feeling to intensify its opposition in creating the fear of the unknown. To be able to trigger such a fear, we must be greeted with instances of what we know to be facts, but the looming cloud of unfamiliarity starts to intermingle with these facts to create the “uncanny” experience. It can be better described as the dark and gloomy area that sits right between the “known” and the “unknown”. However, what if we were actually introduced to a third view? Perhaps the true uncanny experience goes even deeper and it actually reverts back to the original sense of the unknown, rather than the known.

Taking a look at Sigmund Frued’s research of the theory of “uncanny”, he ultimately relates the term to something that is supposed to be kept hidden or secret that comes to light, or made apparent. However, there is one point he made that stands out in particular that relates to the uncanny in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Freud stated that “the story-teller has a peculiarly directive influence over us; by means of the states of mind into which he can put us and the expectations he can rouse in us, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, dam it up to one direction and make it flow in another, and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material,” (Frued, 19). This is particularly true in The Turn of the Screw, in which will be made apparent throughout the remainder of this evaluation.

Freud explains, “The story teller can also choose a setting which, though less imaginary than the world of fairy tales, does yet differ from the real world by admitting superior spiritual entities such as daemonic influences or departed spirits,” (18). We can attest to this account as Henry James plays into the scheme of ghostly apparitions in The Turn of the Screw. The reality, as we know it, is that the governess has gone to Bly to assist her employer by caring for his niece and nephew. James sets us up in a large estate in which the governess is greeted by apparitions.

It is important to note that the governess admitted to remembering the beginning of her accounts of the event as a series of “flights and drops” and as a “see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong.” Thus, her accounts cannot be taken as accurately as she “remembers” them to have happened. This, coupled with the fact that she wrote about her experience many years after the occurrence, takes away from the validity of her account. However, if we take a look at what she knew to be concrete, we can obtain a glimpse of the initial uncanny instances presented in The Turn of the Screw.

When the governess is visited for a second time from the male apparition, Quint, she explains gaining a “flash of knowledge” of what he was there for. She stated, “On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come,” (James, p. 32). She concludes that Quint had come for Miles. With no further explanation, we are led to believe this uncanny experience, in which she immediately gains knowledge from the visit, with no indication given from her visitor.

Another example in which the governess has a sense of knowing in the “unknown” is when she concludes to Miles that Quint will never get to him and he will be safe in her arms. This could be chalked up to her feelings of devotion to Miles, however she had a sense of courage that led her to believe this to be true. It was the same courage that presented her with the knowledge that Quint was not there for her. Miles ends up dying in the arms of his protector, which supersedes her understanding of this truth.

The governess’s accounts of truth, which are taken on to be truths by the reader, could be viewed as a part of James’s elaborate scheme- allowing the reader to dance in the words of the unknown and then offer up the fact that the “knowing” in an “unknowing” situation, leading the reader to believe that these were uncanny instances. The governess, on several occasions, was noted as knowing what, through some type of psychic communications between Peter Quint and herself, needed to be done. This ultimately turned out to be her biggest misconception yet. Or was it ours? Her “knowing” lead to her “unknowingly” stepping foot into Quint’s plan all along, helping to turn the screw, in accompanying Quint in murdering the very person she sought to protect, young and loving Miles. Or was it actually Quint’s plan?

Diving in even deeper, perhaps James’s presentation of “uncanny” in The Turn of the Screw was not the peculiar sense of “knowing” in the “unknown”, but rather “not knowing” the truths we were lead to believe circulating the “known” in the “unknown”. In simpler terms, the truths of what we perceived to be as “uncanny” were simply utilized in a grander scheme in which James orchestrated to be the ultimate uncanny experience of the story in its entirety – the unknown of the known in the unknown.