Turn of the Screw's narrator increasingly compromises her legitimacy as an object[ive] observer through hastily made assumptions about the ghosts, her charges, and her relationship/role with each group; this "slight of hand" draws attention to her attempts to control the position/significance of each part of the relational triad.--Sean

Partially because of perceived inadequacies relating to her social status, the governess in The Turn of the Screw overestimates, and subsequently overstates the importance of her task in caring for the two children, causing her to make rash judgments and illogical leaps which serve to discredit her as a reliable narrator.--JiM

James' novella seems very much to be about assumptions and how those assumptions can lead to misunderstanding, drama, even a completely changed "reality"; thus far, I am not convinced that ghosts truly are appearing, but I am fairly sure that Mrs. Grose, by playing into the hands of the governess, is supplying, however unknowingly, just the amount of information that will keep the governess' imagination going strong--in fact, it is Mrs. Grose that makes this whole story possible in that if she wasn't there to confide in, she wouldn't be there to give support to
the governess' claims, and then her claims might not even exist.--Melissa

The governess in The Turn of The Screw appears to identify herself as the active heroine of her own story, bravely dealing with the apparitions at Bly; this perception of herself as the active heroine creates tensions for her character, much as the female viewer of cinema who identifies with the hero on screen wavers between the psychically allowable female role and the fantasy of action which leads to an identification with masculinity.--Alli

In the very instance where the governess hopes to prove that she is neither "cruel nor mad," the opposite is shown to the readers by neither Flora nor Mrs. Grose seeing Jessel across the pond, despite the governess's protestations that she is there -- her madness, now apparent, so upsets Flora and Mrs. Grose that both must leave Bly in order to survive (98).--Jerry

The final chapter of James' narrative is a climax in (and of) ambiguity, with each verbal exchange between Miles and the Governess increasingly equivocal, and the reader--like the Governess (with Quint looking on) trying to wring a simple confession from Miles--increasingly anxious to impose or maintain his or her (the reader's) identity on the spectral theme within the narrative structure, the end result being an unsatisfactory product of self-fulfillment--a product (a dead one at that?) that is the reader's own creation.--Mike

James' wording in the final sections of The Turn of the Screw creates an intentional amibguity in the text, resulting in a difficulty in discerning whether the "possession" of Miles and Flora is caused by Quint/Jessel or by a projection of the nameless guardian herself.--Clayn

Three particular elements of Peter G. Beidler's "A Critical History of The Turn of the Screw" seem to beg deeper consideration in light of readers' frustration over the meaning of the text: 1) the mention of Cook and Corrigan's interpretation that the novella is a "very subtle fiction about the process of fiction itself," a meta-narrative if you will, and 2) the insistence of some feminist critics that the unreliability of the narrator and the assumed ambiguity of the text are somehow an anti-feminist element and that the tendency to see the narrator as "sexually repressed" or "neurotic" stem from assumptions about gender rather than any "reality", and 3) that the ambiguity of the tale is the point of the tale--that we should allow ourselves and the text to have it both ways because the inability of the reader to truly pinpoint the actual "reality" of the situation is what lends it such brilliance; in fact, the frustration that the reader may feel functions to place the reader in the same position as the frustrated and confused ("sexually" or otherwise) characters.--Melissa

James consciously employs ambiguity as a stylistic device that helps him keep tension of secrecy around the actual accidents at Bly, each time the text approaches the possible narrative truth, another act of miscommunication takes place.--Iana

The varied criticism of The Turn of the Screw has gone to such overwhelming extremes that the truth of the piece has become muddled and incoherent; Dorothea Krook presents the most plausible view of the plot when she discusses James's conscious and unconscious styles and his intentions of writing and finally, Shoshan Felman concludes this point best when she writes that the stories' mysteries should not be "solved," but the "path of its flight" is the most important certainty of the piece.--Molly

THE question of Turn of the Screw centers not on the ambiguities who possesses whom, but rather in a broader discussion of possession and who possesses the text.--Sean

If the Turn of the Screw has an ethical message, it is that the idea of forcing one's personal interpretation of events, or perceptions of reality, on others can become dangerous for both the one fervently trying to convince (in this case the governess), and the potentially convinced (the children and Mrs.Grose), especially since it may at times seem seductive and even beneficial for the convincer to do so.--JiM

The Turn of the Screw moves farthest from a ghost story and closest to a psychological tale in the moments when Flora accuses the governess of cruelty, introducing to the story an alternate but perhaps more useful vision of evil, a vision which has less to do with ghosts and much more to do with a confused child's reaction to an irrational adult.--Alli