Distinguished Discord: Discontinuity and Pattern in the Critical Tradition of The Turn of the Screw

The contention of this book - that the development of the critical tradition of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw (1898) is forwardly progressive - challenges recent theoretical dogmas that proclaim that criticism does not develop and that texts contain only the random meanings assigned to them by the vagaries of the reading process. Further, the contention that aspects of the text of James's ghost tale remain unread a century after its publication proposes that the enterprise of practical criticism is ongoing. Scholars simply know more than earlier readers about all aspects of the tale - its structure, the relation of its parts, the significance of its broken frame, its narrative complications, its language, its cultural roots, its critique of society - in short, its total meaning. Modern critical theory must have credit for demonstrating that much of the critical act amounts to a mere translation from one critical vocabulary to another, and for attacking the New Critical premise that criticism solves the text in authoritative and definitive ways. But it must yield - as far as James's tale is concerned - to the overwhelming evidence that the critical enterprise learns from its past and builds on what it learns. The Turn of the Screw makes a good ground for exploring the questions attendant on a thesis of forwardly progressive criticism because James himself, as the first major critic of the work (in his New York preface, 1908) provoked the controversies that focused the issues for which the critical tradition of the work is noted. Proclaiming that the first readers had imperfectly understood both the author's intentions and the tale's working methods, James challenged the reader to discover the provenience of the tale's authority.