82 pages • 2 hours read
Henry JamesThe Turn of the Screw
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 1898A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 14-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary
The members of the Bly household are walking to church on a crisp Sunday morning. Mrs. Grose holds Flora’s hand, and, some distance behind them, the governess walks with Miles. Without warning, Miles says to her, “Look here my dear, […] when in the world, please, am I going back to school?” (64). The governess has long dreaded this question, and it brings her to a halt. Before the governess can reply, Miles observes that a fellow like himself, who is “getting on” (65), needs the company of his own sex. He then challenges her to say he hasn’t been good, which she does, reminding him of the night on the lawn. Shrugging off that indiscretion, Miles says it was only to show he could be bad, but, he assures her, he is capable of much worse. With that threat hanging between them, Miles asks again when he will return to school. The governess flounders, offering evasive replies until Miles wonders if his uncle knows he is not at school. When she mutters that his uncle doesn’t really care, Miles says he will petition his guardian himself and walks into church.
Chapter 15 Summary
The governess remains in the churchyard, sitting on a tombstone, pondering her options. While she has occasionally wrestled with the meaning of the schoolmaster’s letter, she has heretofore managed to dismiss it as absurd. The governess now admits she fears discovering “the horrors gathered behind” Miles’s expulsion from school, even as she knows Miles is right to demand she resolve “the mystery of this interruption” (67) of his studies. It occurs to her that she could pack her bags and disappear before the Bly household returns from church.
By the time the governess enters the empty hallway of Bly, she has decided to leave. The question of how she will secure transportation makes her despair, and she sinks onto the bottom of the staircase. Realizing how her own slumped figure on the stair mirrors that of the phantom woman she saw from above one night, the governess stands and heads to the schoolroom to collect her things. She stops short inside the room, seeing that same phantom—Miss Jessel—seated at her desk, wearing black and appearing tragic. The spirit rises and moves toward the governess with a look that seems “to say that her right to sit at my table was as good as mine to sit at hers” (69). Then the phantom vanishes, and the governess resolves to stay.
Chapter 16 Summary
Later that afternoon the governess seeks out Mrs. Grose in her quarters. Although no one has questioned her absence from church, the governess explains she was waylaid by the figure of Miss Jessel, who communicated her suffering and left no doubt that “she wants Flora” (71). Mrs. Grose reacts with alarm, and the governess assures her she will write to the children’s uncle and reveal everything. Expanding on her reasons for this, the governess declares “it’s now all out” (71) between Miles and herself on the matter of school. The boy is confident of his advantage over her, as he believes she is afraid to contact his uncle, but she will show him otherwise. She plans to tell the uncle that Miles was expelled “for wickedness. For what else—when he’s so clever and beautiful and perfect? […] He’s exquisite—so it could only be that; and that would open up the whole thing” (72).
Chapter 17 Summary
The governess sits down to write the letter that night as rain and wind batter her bedroom window. Before long, she surrenders to an urge to check on Miles and goes to his closed door. She hears nothing in the boy’s room until his voice chimes out, “I say, you there—come in” (73). As the governess approaches Miles’s bed holding her candle aloft, he gives her a charming smile and says he was lying awake, thinking, and heard her footsteps. When she inquires what he was thinking about, he brings up the matter of school again. The governess assures Miles he will return, perhaps to a different school, but then notes the strangeness of his never having talked about his school days. Because he had never mentioned his school, she assumed he was content to stay at Bly.
Even as he maintains an air of serenity, Miles grows more willful, saying the governess must call his uncle to Bly to tell him she has mismanaged the boy’s schooling. The governess, becoming spirited herself, points out that if they involve his uncle, Miles will have to divulge why his school won’t let him return. Suddenly overcome with pity for the boy, the governess embraces him, entreating him to be truthful with her. He says he wishes she would “let [him] alone” (75), but she can no longer restrain herself. She pointedly asks what happened at his school and even before he went to school. As she drops to his side, crying that she wants to save him, there is “an extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air and a shake of the room” (76). Miles shrieks and the room goes dark. Recovering her wits, the governess notes that her candle went out, to which Miles replies, “It was I who blew it, dear!” (76).
Chapter 18 Summary
The next morning the governess nods when Mrs. Grose asks if she has written to the children’s uncle, but she doesn’t admit she hasn’t sent the letter. The children astonish her with their brilliance during morning lessons, and after lunch, Miles invites her to listen as he plays the piano in the schoolroom. The music is so transporting, the governess imagines she has fallen asleep, but then sits up with a start. She has forgotten Flora and has no idea where the girl is. Leaving behind Miles, who has begun singing, the governess rushes to Mrs. Grose’s room, certain the girl is with her. But she is not. After determining that Flora is nowhere in the house, the governess feels sure she is with Miss Jessel. She tells the housekeeper that Miles deliberately distracted her to allow his sister to go off unnoticed. As she hurries out the door, the governess leaves her letter on the table, to be posted. Mrs. Grose hovers at the doorway, reluctant to venture into the gray weather, but then follows the governess to search for Flora.
Chapters 14-18 Analysis
Chapter 14 marks a turning point in the relationship between the governess and Miles. The boy has already shown signs of an independent spirit, but during their walk to church, he levies a full challenge to the governess’s authority. Even before Miles speaks, the governess observes how his clothing registers the power and authority that are, in fact, a male prerogative: “Turned out for Sunday by his uncle’s tailor, who had had a free hand and a notion […] of his grand little air, Miles’s title to independence, the rights of his sex and situation, were […] stamped upon him” (64). While Miles is entitled to independence and power due to his “sex and situation,” the governess is not, for the same reasons. As an English woman in the Victorian age, her right to independence is already curtailed; but as the daughter of a poor parson, the governess can make no claims to independence or true authority. Thus, she flounders when Miles asserts his will, admitting she “felt helpless” (65). The boy declares his wish to return to school and maintains command of the conversation that follows, leaving the defeated governess sitting on a tombstone.
Immediately following her confrontation with Miles, the governess decides to leave her position at Bly. This is a significant departure from her former resolve to protect the children and merits some attention. Critics have argued that the governess becomes excessively attached to the children, particularly Miles. Her eagerness to vanquish Quint thus derives less from a wish to free him from Quint’s influence than from a desire to possess the boy herself. If the governess has convinced herself that Miles is content to spend his days with her, he disabuses her of this idea outside the church by insinuating her company is unsatisfying. Moreover, if the governess has fancied herself the heroine in a gothic romance—and substituted Miles for his uncle in the role of the dashing hero—Miles, by asserting his authority, effectively commandeers her authorship function. Her gothic fantasy cut short, the governess decides to leave Bly. Before departing, she finds herself sitting on the stair in a manner remarkably similar to that of Miss Jessel’s specter, and then discovers the phantom woman seated at her own desk. In both instances the governess sees herself in her predecessor, so when she addresses Miss Jessel as “you terrible miserable woman” (69), she is likely speaking of herself.
Disciplined by her religion and Victorian culture to view sexuality as sinful and female sexual desire, in particular, as unnatural, the governess cannot bring herself to speak directly about the subject. It pleases her to imagine her employer’s admiration, but to experience desire for him would horrify her, compelling her to repress such feelings. Regardless of whether Miss Jessel’s spirit is real, the dishonor the governess assigns her predecessor may reflect her own guilt over her feelings for her employer and, arguably, for Miles. Because the governess cannot acknowledge sexuality, even when recording her experiences decades later, it haunts her narrative as an ambiguous anxiety, even dread. Thus, when Miles says outside the church, “You know my dear, for a fellow to be with a lady always—,” the governess “[tries] to laugh” off his insinuation but achieves only an “ugly and queer” (65) effect. Later, she is drawn to his bedside during the night. What follows is an exchange in which the enormity of what remains unsaid looms so large, it pushes the governess to finally ask Miles what happened at school. His response is preempted either by paranormal forces or by the governess’s own psyche, which defends against impermissible, unspeakable truths by launching “an extraordinary blast and chill, a gust of frozen air and a shake of the room” (76).
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By Henry James
