The Turn of the Screw: Coincidentia Oppositorum

The cumulative power of nuance and the search for an elusive secret—the characteristic technique and theme of much of Henry James' work—are archetypally manifested in The Turn of the Screw, a work in which the images, the actions, the intellectual preciosity of the governess, the theme, the hoped-for terror-reaction of the audience, and even the diction itself are harmoniously fitted to the deliberately calm and persevering manner in which James accumulates minute details with every inexorable turn of the screw, ultimately penetrating the secret of secrets, the coincidentia oppositorum. Although many works of art illustrate the balance, or unity, of opposites, few works successfully embody the actual union of opposites, a concept equated with the essence of art by Coleridge, with the essence of physical and metaphysical laws by Hegel, and with the essence of the Selbst by Jung. The union of the divine and the demonic in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the union of concave and convex and sun and ice in Coleridge's Kubla Khan, the union of hot Eros and cold Thanatos in Keats's Eve of St. Agnes, the union of life and death at the mystic Centre of Updike's The Centaur, and the numerous unions in James's The Turn of the Screw are some of the examples of the effectively created coincidentia oppositorum in literature. And of these works none has a title which is so richly symbolic as that of James' story, for James' title is itself the focal point, the source, and the epitome of the most important images, the linguistic leitmotifs, the theme, and the basic symbolic actions illustrative of the union of opposites.

Unfortunately every critic of The Turn of the Screw must begin his analysis with a caveat concerning his opinion of the reliability of the governess-narrator. In my own approach I tend to deëmphasize the case study approach of focussing upon the character of the governess and to emphasize a focus upon the strictly aesthetic principles of parallelism, systematic