The Fantasy of a Young Woman in the Turn of the ScrewThe Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, is the strange story of a young woman who, leaving her small country house for the first time, she accepts a job as a governess in a wealthy house. Shortly after arriving, she begins to suffer from insomnia and feels like she sees ghosts wandering the park. James is a great storyteller and sometimes the complexity of the story makes it difficult to follow. The Turn of the Screw is a story within a story, with the story of the governess read aloud like a ghost story among friends. Harold C. Goddard wrote a fascinating review entitled “A Pre-Freudian Reading of the Turn of the Screw.” Applied to the book, his theory makes perfect sense. Goddard suggests that the governess, young and inexperienced, immediately falls in love with her employer when they meet. Due to her unrequited love, her overactive mind creates a fantasy in which the two ghosts intend to harm children, in order to become a heroine, thus attracting the attention of her employer. Goddard points out that the young woman has been unstable from the start. Little is known about her past, except that she is “the youngest of several daughters of a poor country priest” (4). It immediately becomes obvious to the reader that such a drastic change in environment that he is experiencing is cause enough for him to feel extreme anxiety. Indeed, she told Mrs. Grose, "I get carried away quite easily. I was carried away to London!" (8). After her interview with her potential employer, the man from Harley Street and the uncle of her young charges, she can't stop talking about the man, praising him and...... middle of paper..... . which haunt the patterns. The story is told through the voice of the governess, which, given her mental state, makes it difficult to decipher what is really happening. There are many questions that are never answered, but are instead left for the reader to decide. Works cited and consultedFreud, Sigmund. An overview of psychoanalysis. New York: WW Norton & Company, Inc., 1969. Goddard, Harold C. A Pre-Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw. New York: Hillary House Publishers, 1960. James, Henry. “The turn of the screw”. The Turn of the Screw and other short novels. New York: New American Library, 1995. Nunning, Ansgar. “Unreliable narrator.” Encyclopedia of the novel. Ed. Paul Schellinger. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998. 1386-1388. Wagenknecht, Edward. The Tales of Henry James. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co..., 1984.