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Screw By Henry James, Due Essay

The New York Times continued with "the strongest and most affecting argument against sin we have lately encountered in literature." At that, through a process of self-annihilation, this journalist went on to "express the awful, almost overpowering sense of the evil that human nature is subject to derive from it [the story] by the sensitive reader." He judged the story as "one of the most moving and...most remarkable works of fiction published in many years." Timing; it was all about timing. Ahhh, but there is more...

The Detroit Free Press termed the work a "horribly successful study of depravity, equal in stature to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." On that exact day, as recorded in the New York Tribune on October 23, 1898, (p. 14), this novella "crystallizes an original and fascinating idea in absolutely appropriate form."

Further, both the Overland Monthly (November, 1898, p 493) and the Springfield Republican praised the story's authorship (October 1898, p 8) for it being "unique among storytellers" for his knack of "riveting...the reader's attention on every sentence."

To accompany this ambiguity between praise or dismay, more reviews appeared in the St. Paul Daily Pioneer Press (November 1898, p 36), Life (November 1898, p 368), the Portland Morning Oregonian (November 1898, p. 22), the Critic (December 1898, p 524), and Ainslee's Magazine (December, 1898, p 518)....

The American Monthly Review of Reviews (December, 1898, p 732-733), all which regarded this novella as "the finest work ... [James] has ever done -- for the foul breath of the bottomless pit itself."
Reflecting entirely on Freudian theory here, as Wilson argues, "the governess who is made to tell the story is a neurotic case of sex repression, and that the ghosts are not real ghosts but hallucinations of the governess." This entirely constitutes the basis for in Freud's view, in concern to this all, "Overdetermination, the idea that a single observed effect is determined by multiple causes at once (any one of which alone might be enough to account for the effect);" this was initially a key conviction, which began as one of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis.

References

James, Henry, Deborah Esch, and Jonathan Warren. The Turn of the Screw. 2nd Edition. New York: WW Norton & Co Inc., 1999. Print.

ed. Dabney, Lewis.The Portable Edmund Wilson. p.128 -- 129 (1983)

Cargill, Oscar. "Henry James as Freudian Pioneer." Chicago Review 10 (1956): 13-29.

Goddard, Harold C. "A Pre-Freudian Reading of the Turn of the Screw." Nineteenth Century Fiction June 1957: 1-36.

Booth, Wayne C. "He began to read to our hushed little circle': Are We Blessed or Cursed by Our Life with the Turn of the Screw?" In James, Henry. "The Turn of…

Sources used in this document:
References

James, Henry, Deborah Esch, and Jonathan Warren. The Turn of the Screw. 2nd Edition. New York: WW Norton & Co Inc., 1999. Print.

ed. Dabney, Lewis.The Portable Edmund Wilson. p.128 -- 129 (1983)

Cargill, Oscar. "Henry James as Freudian Pioneer." Chicago Review 10 (1956): 13-29.

Goddard, Harold C. "A Pre-Freudian Reading of the Turn of the Screw." Nineteenth Century Fiction June 1957: 1-36.
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