Abstract

Henry James's The Turn of the Screw is well-known

for its ambiguity. Though it could serve as a source of

illustrations for several important modern theories of

language and literature, it still remains in a certain

sense unreadable, since it can be regarded equally

justifiably as a ghost story or as a case history of

neurosis, without giving any solid basis for a reading

which could unify the two texts into an organic whole.

For this reason, it seems that the approach which can

best satisfy the scholarly as well as the common reader

is the application to the story of what, in his book The

Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre,

Tzvetan Todorov calls the "pure fantastic." In substance

this thesis attempts to determine as exactly as possible

the new meaning Todorov gives to the term "fantastic" by

comparing it with the several other usages the word has

been and is still receiving in literature, and

demonstrates how well this concept fits in with the

irreducible ambiguity 'of The Turn of the Screw.

Essentially, Todorov's "pure fantastic" is a

narrative genre which produces in the reader a state of

hesitation between interpreting the events in the

narrative as being either uncanny or marvellous. The

effect of hesitation determines the genre. The Turn of

the Screw illustrates this theory of Todorov as well as

it does several other literary theories.

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