The spurn of the screw : Henry James's project of perversion management in three late supernatural tales

This study is a reading of three late supernatural tales by Henry James: "Owen Wingrave" (1892), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and "The Jolly Corner" (1908). The focus is on James's use of gothic conventions and rhetorical devices in an abiding project of perversion management, whereby unacceptable sexuality and sexual impulses are relegated to the register of the ghostly. James's use of preterition, prosopopoeia, and aposiopesis in the creation of a discursively gothic environment is discussed in the context of the Victorian idea of manhood, the precarious role of the governess, and the development of the urban American male of the early twentieth century. All three texts harbour concerns about male same-sex desire, especially about the imperative to control, segregate, and eradicate it. This erasure is effected in all three texts, though never without tragic results. This study explores the ways in which James uses the conventions of gothic to portray that traged