To Be Loved Is To Be Seen: Gazing as a Form of Interpretation in the Turn of the Screw
The heated discourse that would follow Henry James’s novella “The Turn of the Screw” centered on whether the ghosts were real or not. With Shoshana Felman’s groundbreaking article “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” a new-found focus on the ambiguities, as opposed to finding a singular, definitive meaning of the novella would usurp the Freudian and anti-Freudian arguments. With the governess’s sight being the main source of debate, reading the novella through the Lacanian lens of the Gaze, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic offer unprecedented explanations and arguments for the governess’s behavior. Given the contemporary shift to discussing the ambiguities of the novella, this thesis argues that the Gaze, a concept historically fixed as negative and strictly associated with the patriarchal authority should be regarded with an ambivalent eye.
The Turn of the Screw, Freudian, anti-Freudian, Patriarchy, English Language and Literature
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations