Is the turn of the screw a ghost story?

<p><p>It is, and always will be, an enigma. It never tells explicitly, but it throws out many, many hints and clues. It is perhaps a ghost story, or perhaps a tale recounting the cruelty of a psychotic, deluded governess who hounds one child into madness, and the other into emotional shock so severe that it kills him. Or, as I now perceive after reading a treatise on critical speculation about the story, it may be only an allegorical fantasy on what MIGHT have happened if the governess had let herself give her emotions destructively inappropriate free rein. Some believe that Miles Douglas was the name of the man who told the tale round the fire at Christmastime, which had been written out for him long ago by the woman with whom he shared an unfulfilled, unspoken, completely forbidden love: the governess of his younger sister, Flora.

Guinn Berger