Muriel G. Shine

Muriel G. Shine attempted to interpret the Turn of the Screw through several perspectives.

One of them is the fact of holding that the story is concerned with how unethical it is for a person to act when he or she is guided by a totally unreliable knowledge about reality. This can be applied when taking into account the governess’ perception in the story. While other authors argue that the apparitions are real and that she makes a great effort to act in the best way she can to deal with them, Shine on the other hand, argues that the governess embodies all the wrong characteristics for a person to gain knowledge from different life circumstances.

Shine claims that a vital part of this quest for knowledge is to firstly gain knowledge about oneself and recognizing one’s flaws and defects. This is in fact the kind of insight that the governess fails to make throughout this story, as she is not aware of the possible danger and the seriousness of her distorted perceptions of reality. This inability to reflect upon the nature of her perceptions has a terrible consequence in both children: that of forcing them to “see” what she sees and to expose them on her perverse knowledge. What children finally get to see are not the perceptions themselves, but the governess’ corrupted personality.

Shine also sees the governess from a psychoanalytic perspective. She argues that the governess is characterized as a manipulative adolescence, and this can be appreciated in her unrealistic idealization of the children’s guardian, whom she only saw twice, and her constant desire to manipulate Miles and to submit him under her control.

Lastly, Shine exposes her reader-response criticism in that she claims that this kind of criticism depends upon the analysis of the text itself as a kind of place where something is missing, inviting readers to retrieve these gaps  from their different psychological perspectives.

I must say that I really enjoyed reading Shine’s analysis of the Turn of the Screw, in that I could see that all the things that she claimed about the story are really accurate and totally proven. I could totally feel identified with her analysis, since from very first moment I started reading the novel, I noticed that the narrator’s perspective, that of the governess, had not be relied on at all.