![]() ![]() ![]() A systematic study (by Alice Hall Petry) has gone a long way in demonstrating the overlap of the two texts, highlighting the concept of the role-playing governess: she would act out the character of Jane, ’The Turn of the Screw’ becoming a parody of Charlotte’s romantic novel. ![]() James would then rank among the practitioners of the tropes familiar among his forerunners in the novel of sentiment and its stereotypes: ”the perceiving female subject, the Gothic structures and the explained supernatural” (Milbank 159).ĢOne persistent reference is of course to Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, insofar as the text of the novella relates to the ”governess novel” and to the question of a ”mystery” at Bly and its imprisoned inmate. Edel’s contention is that James’s attempt was to enshrine that tradition in his story: ”The Brontë’s rather than the modern psychological movement nascent in Vienna” (Edel Stories of the Supernatural 433, quoted by Perry 62). 1Considering hypothetical sources for ’The Turn of the Screw’ in terms of generic intertext might show James apparently toying with the great tradition of the English novel and with its undercurrents of society and sex, as exemplified in fantasy (the gothic) or in manners (the realistic novel). ![]()
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