Give the Screw Another Turn—A Cultural Re-Reading of the Turn of the Screw

Henry James' novel The Turn of the Screw is notorious for its ambiguous nature about the ghostly figures that keep haunting the protagonist the governess.This paper attempts to give the study of this novel another turn of the screw by arguing that it is a hybrid of popular culture of ghost stories and high culture of psychological studies of ghosts.It is intended by Henry James as a blueprint for the development of American culture.