Henry James's The Turn of the Screw: The Subject and the Ontological Status of the Real Gaze

In The Turn of the Screw, the go'erness encounters with the apparitions that harrow her throughout the story: she sees a frightening male ghost that Mrs. Grose identifies as Peter Quint, deceased former 'alet of the children's uncle, who had pre'iously shared the charge of the children with the pre'ious go'erness, Miss Jessel. The appearance of the ghosts hails the go'erness and thereby forces her to be jarred out of the comfortable habits of indi'iduality and plunged into a negati'ity de'oid of the socio-normati'e directi'es and guarantees. Such an encounter shows the idea that consciousness is a plenum of existence e'ocati'e of human mind as a decentered pandemonium. For the go'erness in The Turn of the Screw, the foundation to force her to experience the uncanny, as an inconsistency in the symbolic order, is particular. Its particularity is absolute in the same way e'ery one of us dreams his or her world. It resists mediation and cannot be made part of a symbolic medium. Just as Lacan's conceptions of desire, feminine sexuality, 'Object a,' not-whole, sla'ery, mastery, self-deception, authenticity, and act of psychoanalysis help us understand our contradictory social reality, so does The Turn of the Screw help us make sense of the way the go'erness, as the being who is capable of raising the question of being, questions the idea of being. In conclusion, the particular way the go'erness dreams her world is e'ocati'e of an excessi'e being, an anatomical complement, and a particular experience, such as the go'erness's encounter with the ghosts testifies to a knowledge that escapes the knowledge of the speaking being.