Literary Analysis: Turn Of The Screw

Turn of the Screw in it’s most simplest form is a Victorian ghost story that centers around a governess who has no support from her employer and the children that she is attempting to save from the preserved ghosts. However, when we delve deeper into the meaning behind the story we find a complex display of societal dictations that control the characters interactions, their motives, and their thoughts. The Marxist reading of this storyline helps us to see these different classes, by looking at the economic and social standings of characters and gives us insight into why the governess feels threatened by the ghosts and the meaning behind her actions. In “Turn of the Screw” we can specifically focus on the governess internal struggle of her own …show more content…
During a conversation with Mrs.Grose, she explains that because of what Quint did he is “impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved." She is clearly disturbed by the interactions between the two social classes and looks down on those who break the boundaries. In the essay “The Place of a Servant in the Scale,” Stuart Burrows describes how exactly this distaste for her predecessors behavior couples with her own desires for her employer. Burrows explains that “ the governess’s horror at the appearance of the ghosts ‘has as much to do with the sexual and class transgressions as with their ghostly reappearing act.’ They provoke thoughts of a servant succeeding his or her station,’ thoughts inevitably entertained by the governess since ‘her love for the Master requires that at some future point she herself must repeat the ghosts’ transgressions.’” (Burrows 88) She shows her disgusted of the idea of the two classes intermingling, but also relates to the two because of her own attraction to her employer. The appearance of the ghosts is a reflection of her suppressed desire for a relationship out of her own social class. She knows that she would be viewed the same as her predecessors if she were to go against the social hierarchy, and this seems to be the thing that bothers her the most about their appearance. She is afraid that if she follows her own desires as they did she will, in turn, become as they did. She would be seen as a pollutant, someone who could corrupt the children that are put into her care. She wants to be seen as the perfect governess, the heroine who saves the children from the deviant, sexualized servants, and her desires coming to light would destroy this