The Turn of The Screw is a recurring concept throughout the story as sort of a motif, it is a saying that is repeated to gain your attention and make you question how it fits in the story. Not only is this meant to grab your attention but it is repeated at crucial parts in the story making you start to personify the statement and it becomes an overlaying character that helps progress or digress the storyline, and finally it is also a marker to insinuate the governesses slow descent into madness!
Thus, I believe that the ‘Turn of the Screw’ is the phrase to insinuate the slow descent of the governess and the comparison to the stages of grief. The story is set in a gothic themed mansion with four essential characters, The Governess, Miles, Flora, and Quint and Jessel(Ghosts). The Turn of The Screw is truly in correlation to the Governesses ever changing feelings and suspicions towards Miles and Floras actions. adores Miles and Flora when she first meets them, she quickly becomes suspicious of their every word and action, convinced that they hope to deceive her.
She is odd, however, and switches back to being absolutely sure of their pure innocence. At these times, her affection for the children can be intense, she begins to stalk them and watch them to make sure that they are safe, this is the representation of the turning of the screw, the turning being the change in affection towards the children, by the governess, and thusly the children are screwed up by the turning of the Governess.
Throughout the story | slowly began to devise a comparison with the Governesses emotions and the 5 stages of grief, each chapter changed the emotion and tone of the Governess as she became more suspicious and obsessive over the children. The stages include denial, which is evident at the beginning of the story hen the Governess, ignored the strange occurrences and began to blame something other than the children, Anger, this shows as the Governess began to question and obsess over the children’s whereabouts and what the did, bargaining and depression, though it doesn’t directly say the Governess bargained she did beg to have control and have a hold on the situation and her obsession to explain everything that happened in the mansion, becoming mad, imagining ghosts and hearing sounds, her image on reality became skewed and became depressed, the final stage became self-evident as Miles died; Acceptance, though she didn’t accept the situation and pleaded it was the work of supernatural entities, she tried to use that excuse for her insubordinate behavior as she watched over the children, and thus she had to accept that she had failed them.
To conclude the stages of grief and the saying of the turn of the screw, every time that a new stage began that saying would appear, almost if intentional! To further explain the saying, we must delve deep into the history of the saying. It started in the 14th century as ‘To Turn a New Leaf’ which meant to start anew, became something more professional as ‘The Change in Tides’ as of the 15th century, which also meant a change or something new, and by the 16th century and up it was known as ‘The Turn of The Screw’, as this book was published in 1898 it comes to my knowledge that this saying was meant to mean something new, a new start, a new beginning. This further explains my belief that it is a saying that started a new phase for the Governess, it also meant a new start, or something new…
To sum it up, the saying ‘The Turn of The Screw’ came from old saying to mean a new start, which further explains the sharp changes of the Governess during her descent, and how the stages of grief was footnotes to explain the mental status of the Governess as she tried to explain her behavior and actions towards the children. To compare this saying to other stories would be a fruitless task however, even though the stages of grief explain some of the meaning, the story was left very vague with an explosive and unpredictable ending, leaving a plethora of questions. So is this really ‘The Turn of The Screw’ explanation or is this just another theory?…
