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Henry James was interested in psychology and read many books on it, which ,were written by his brother William, one of the world-famous psychologists those days. It is sure that he was much influenced on psychology by William. James wrote many famous interesting psychological novels. Particularly in 1898 he issued "The Turn of the Screw," which has such techniques of literature as stream of consciousness, description of ghosts, in the American realism. Also in this novel there are religious mood, scene, and background. We can, therefore, take approaches to it on different sides: Freudian psychoanalysis, a simple ghost story, or religion. According to the well-known critic Robert Heilman, Bly itself is almost an Eden with its lawn and bright flowers. Miles and Flora are beautiful and innocent. They are symbolic children as the ghosts are symbolic ghosts. Even the names themselves have a representative quality as the rest of James`s characters often do: Miles-the soldier, the archetypal male; Flora-the flower, the essential female. Such innocent children were, however, getting more and more depraved by committing sin as Adam and Eve. One day the young pupil Miles was dismissed from school. The insane new governess believed that the children were getting tainted by holding communion with ghosts of the late servant Peter Quint and the late governess Miss Jessel (Miles with the ghost of Peter Quint and Flora with that of Miss Jessel). In the end Flora who had a fever was sent to London with the housemaid Mrs. Grose. Miles was left at Bly with the new governess. Miles confessed to her that he had burnt her letter after reading it without her permission, which she would have sent to her employer in London to solve the difficult problem of Miles`s dismissal from school. It was so difficult that she wrote the letter, even if she had promised the employer not to trouble him: neither appeal nor complain nor write about anything: only meet all questions herself, take the whole thing over and let him alone. Of course as an bachelor, he was only one relative of the orphans Miles and Flora. He was a single uncle of them. He immensely pitied the poor children and had done all he could. He had in particular sent them down to his other house Bly in the country, the proper place for them, parting even with his own servants to wait on them. Miles confessed the sin to her, and then the ghost of Pater Quint like the Serpent invading the Garden of Eden was standing at the window in front of them. When Miles was on the point of confessing the other sin committed to be expelled from school, his little heart stopped. Just before his heart`s stopping he regretted that he had used to his friends in school the language picked up from Peter Quint. He had resentment against him: "Peter Quint-you devil!" So his death is not sacrifice by neither the ghost nor the insane new governess but a sublime one. Because it accords with the Creed of Christianity as sin pays its wage-death. His death is also the one for his soul to be redeemed as well as for the theme of salvation, emphasized by the writer. In other words the governess was a country-bred, young girl of the age of twenty. She was lacking of experience in her life since then. In such a state she took over the difficult task from her employer, obliged to wander in a labyrinth. Because she was created and destined to do so as a character and narrator by the author Henry James. The reason is that he would like to develop the story with the intention of giving expression to his theme such as Christian form, "depravity→ sin→confession→death→salvation."
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