To my recollection, the phrase “turn of the screw” occurred twice in the book, once in the prologue and once in the text. In both cases it meant “turning it up a notch”, or pushing something a bit further.
I would like to propose that the book itself was intended to disclose, as much as could be done in Victorian England, and for that matter, what amounted to Victorian America, the fact of child sexual abuse, and its attendant horrors.
You will recollect that none of this really started coming out in any significant way until roughly the 1980’s. I don’t claim to know the history in any detail, but one of the early salvos was Jeffrey Masson’s “The Assault on Truth”, published in 1984. Another major book was Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman, which I now see was only published in 1992.
It’s amazing to see how recent all this is, and how utterly incompetent mainstream psychology and psychiatry has been in dealing with trauma, which to my mind is the root cause of nearly all non-organic emotional maladies. Most of that is Freud’s fault, as Herman outlines well, and the specifics of which are the topic of Masson’s book. He more or less created a Mass Distraction, a false trail leading nowhere. There is no Oedipal or Electra Complex. There are creepy old men and occasionally–as James hinted–women.
The Catholic sex abuse scandals really didn’t start picking up attention until the late 1980’s. It’s astonishing to consider that, now.
For his part, Freud gave his paper on the Aetiology of Hysteria in 1896. Turn of the Screw was published in 1998.
Aetiology of Hysteria had the truth in it: women were being sexually abused by family members.
And I will propose something specific: hysteria is a neurological manifestation of partial “freezing”, in a neurological sense. It is the assertion of the reptilian brain into specific sets of nerves, caused by unprocessed emotional trauma, much of it sparked by unwanted and inappropriate sexual experience. To be clear, it’s not the “sex” that is the problem. It is the inability of a child to contextualize and process it. It amounts to an attack by an authority figure, someone who should be trustworthy, which sets the childs whole sense of self and their place in the world into profound confusion, and does so long before they are rational enough to right themselves. It creates a template of horror which is largely unconscious.
I will further propose that Henry James himself may have been a victim of it. He was, in my understanding, a lifelong bachelor, or at least so seemingly uninterested in women that it was rumored, perhaps then, and certainly in modern times, that he might be gay.
Maybe he was just wounded, and speaking either to his own horror or that of someone very close to him.