In Search of Supports: Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw” in Dates and Numbers

The article offers a new look at Henry James’s novella “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), which has attracted the attention of numerous literary and film scholars, cultural critics, and musicologists. The author is tackling three different aspects of James’s text — its motives, its plot and story. The paper attempts to determine the degree of the writer’s arbitrariness of dating the events depicted in the novella, rather than that of his choice of details. Also, the rigidity of the story-structure is questioned. In the first section of the paper, it is proved that one of the crucial leitmotivs in the story happens to be overshadowed in critical works on “The Turn of the Screw.” This is the leitmotif of death. The second section looks into the seemingly arbitrary indications of intervals between the events of the story in the text of the novella. Meanwhile, certain indications in James’s text allow us to reconstruct the plausible dates of a series of events. Those are represented in the plot- and timeline scheme in the paper. Finally, the third section offers the analysis of rhythmic and tempo structure of the story in “The Turn of the Screw,” as well as its dynamics. The proposed chapters vs. story twists scheme shows James’s design of the pacing and the regularity of the twists in the novella. A well-thought-out chronology, rhythmic arrangement of the “turns,” as well as the changes in tempo — all this, combined with the haunting ambiguity of “The Turn of the Screw,” helps to maintain the tension. The “atmosphere” of the story results not only from the supernatural motifs employed, that are characteristic of late Victorian Gothic, or from the exquisite narrative structure. Rather, the appeal of James’s masterpiece, among other things, is rooted in its unique “musical” arrangement.