The Turn Of The Screw Character Analysis

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Throughout the years, the evolution of literature and the changes to which this has led can serve as a great example to realise that there is not a specific way of writing. On the contrary, the way in which a literary work is written says a lot about it. If we go back to the Victorian period, one of the elements which did not go unnoticed in gothic literature was the narrative structure and the different techniques the authors used to apply to it. According to the literature of that time, it could be said that the fact of choosing to use just one or several narrative voices is decisive in a novel and it directly influences aspects of it such as its reliability, since the more different perspectives the readers have of the story the more chances…show more content…
Although both of them have many elements in common, such as the medieval environment typical of gothic literature or the fact that they revolve around horror events, it is the narrative approach the one which make the big difference between them. On the one hand, although we could talk about three different voices in The Turn of the Screw – the governess, Douglas and Henry James – is the one of the governess, the main character, which plays clearly the most important role during the whole novel. While the first narrator – who may or not be Henry James himself – is present only very briefly, the governess takes possession of the actions, causing the other voices to almost…show more content…
People who defend this position claim that the events that the three different voices are describing are totally contradictory because of the fact they are completely different persons with distinctive moralities and thoughts. Thus, this may cause the readers to misunderstand the novel or to doubt about which version of the story they should trust. This is what Robbie B. H. Goh refers to in his article about Stevenson’s play with narrative voices: “The inability to account for this contradictory impulse leads Garett to conclude that the novella is guilty of “fictional irresponsibility,” a refusal or failure to offer any secure position for its reader or to establish any fixed relation between its voices.” What Goh is trying to say is that Stevenson should have made a clearer connection between the characters’ versions. In this way, the plot would not have been so inconsistent for the
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