REPRESSION, MADNESS, AND THE DEATH DRIVE: A FREUDIAN STUDY OF THE GOVERNESS IN THE TURN OF THE SCREW

Abstract

This article applies a Freudian framework to the figure of the governess in The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, exploring how repression, madness, and the death drive converge in her psyche. It argues that the governess’s sexual and social repression generate a neurotic anxiety that manifests in hallucinatory visions of spectral figures and in her destructive relationship with the children, Miles and Flora. Drawing on critic Edmund Wilson’s Freudian reading, namely, that the governess is “a neurotic case of sex-repression, and the ghosts are not real ghosts at all but merely the governess’s hallucinations” (Wilson), the article situates her behaviour within classical Freudian concepts of the death drive (Thanatos) and the return of the repressed. The analysis addresses two major interlinked dimensions: how the governess’s refusal or inability to articulate her latent desires leads to escalating madness and destabilisation of identity, and how her attempts to assert mastery over the children paradoxically enact the death drive in the obliteration of innocence, culminating in the boy’s death. The article also identifies conceptual confusion in existing criticism, particularly regarding whether the ghosts are literal or symbolic, and argues that such ambiguity reflects the very structure of the drive in the unconscious, where repression, repetition and return collapse. In doing so, it shows that the governess is not simply a victim of external spectral forces, but an agent through whom Freud’s dynamic of repression and destruction plays out in narrative form.