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The Death of Miles in The Turn of the Screw

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Muriel West
Muriel West*
Affiliation:
Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Ill.
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Extract

Critics have always been struck by the death scene that concludes The Turn of the Screw and, being struck, have given us a variety of interpretations—psychological, religious, poetic; but they have never accounted for the improbability that Miles—whose good health and sound heart are never questioned in the tale—should die of heart failure. In James's other stories concluding with the death of a young boy (“The Pupil” and “The Author of Beltraffio”) we are prepared by earlier accounts of the boy's health to accept his final death. Not so with Miles. We are not even prepared to find him bewildered and demoralized by the series of embarrassing questions put to him by his governess: Miles is presented as remarkably well-poised for a ten-year-old.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 3 , June 1964 , pp. 283 - 288
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1964

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References

1 Dorothea Krook, The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (Cambridge, England, 1962), pp. 125–127, 375 ff.

2 Preface to Vol. xii of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (New York, 1908), xviii. This volume of this edition is used throughout this paper for references to the Preface and to the text of The Turn of the Screw.

3 The Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock (New York, 1920), i, 289–290.

4 The Ghostly Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (New Brunswick, N. J., 1948), pp. 744–746.

5 For analysis of the self-hypnosis possibility and related ambiguities, see my A Stormy Night with “The Turn of the Screw” (Phoenix, Ariz.: Frye and Smith, Ltd., 1964).

6 Henry James, Autobiography, ed. Frederick W. Dupee (New York, 1956), pp. 196–197.