Stories that contain mentally unstable, or untrustworthy narrators typically tend to throw the audience into a place of unease. Henry James is a perfect example of one such author that makes use of the unstable and untrustworthy narrator in his most famous work, The Turn of the Screw. The narrator in The Turn of the Screw, is an unreliable twenty year old female referred to as the Governess. The Governess can be viewed as either an insane villain or as a helpless heroine giving the audience the power to change their entire perspective of the Governess, or rather the entire book. The Governess has the job of supervising two children at an estate, named Bly. She is just the age of twenty and has a tremendous responsibility to watch over two children for her employer, a man who she has fallen in love with. Towards the beginning of the story the Governess’s sanity begins to be questioned when she sees a man, identified by Mrs. Grose as…show more content… While the Governess is making the decisions, we as the readers are actually making the real decision about the mental state of the Governess. Henry James puts the reader in a greater position of power than the Governess herself feels in most scenes. All throughout the text the Governess doubts her ability to supervise the children and keep them innocent. As the story progresses she tries harder and harder to keep the children her own, for example keeping miles at Bly instead of allowing him to attend school. In the ending of the book, Miles has suffered too much under the emotionally unstable Governess and ends up dying in her arms. The reader has control over whether they believe the Governess murdered miles, or imagined the entire scene. When such power is put into the reader’s hands, the story can be different for every single person who picks up the