The fantastic modernistor Henry James's "The turn of the screw", revisited

Résumé

Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898) is defined by its ambivalence, as well by the coalescence of apparently contradictory realities. It is, to all extents, an ambiguous text, which has generated a deeply controversial critical debate over the decades. The aim of this article is to reappraise James’s novella from the paradigm of the ‘fantastic’ as formulated by Tzvetan Todorov in 1970, so as to integrate traditionally opposed viewpoints. For the characteristics of the fantastic that Todorov identifies are usually understood as cognate with the more commons traits of gothic fiction; yet this article argues that the fantastic elements that Todorov ascribes to The Turn of the Screw are in fact simultaneously gothic and modernist, and thus allow for establishing a continuum of meaning that might actually assimilate critical approaches that have conventionally been deemed divergent and irreconcilable.