A Fine Line Of Sanity In Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw

A Fine Line Of Sanity In Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw

A Fine Line of Sanity in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw
It is often said that there is a fine line between being insane and sane. Frequently, the person assumed to have crossed the line to the realm of insanity does not withhold the power to realize they that have indeed crossed the thin line. In Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, the governess’s narrative authority is questioned because of her lack of reliability. The governess can be interpreted as unreliable due to her unstable mind and odd accusations of the children‘s intentions. The audience comes across a chain of events conveying that her insanity slowly escalates to the climax at the end of the novel where she unintentionally kills Miles. This dramatic path from sanity to a complete infringement of the mind by insanity was caused by mental instability that originated from the governess’s fear and anxiousness. As a result of her not only crossing, but defining the line of sane and insane, the governess expresses her lack of mental stability through her hallucinations, uncompromising mindset that the children are capable of intellectual complexities, and her neurotic acts and assumptions.
Mental disorders often develop because of fear or loneliness. It is portrayed that the governess experiences both of these at the beginning of the novel. Not only is she is dealing with the stress of being the head of the Bly household, but also feeling lonely and fearful because of how secluded the estate is. She states her uneasiness after arriving. “Wasn’t it just a storybook over which I had fallen adoze and adream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half-replaced and half-utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!” (James). By her description the audience can implicate that she felt lost and somewhat alone in...