THE TURN OF THE SCREW

A governess comes to the care of two children in an old Victorian mansion. What initially seems like a pleasant task will lead to a nightmare situation. The children live impacted by an immediate past in which the former governess, Miss Jessel, and Peter Quint, the servant and valet of the patron (the uncle of the children), maintained a murky relationship. It could be assumed that certain abuses occurred. Life with the previous governess and her subsequent death have left an indelible mark on them. In trying to help them, the protagonist of the story begins to hear voices, songs, and to see the image of the former governess, dead in strange circumstances, and that of the servant, in what, apparently, would be ghost appearances. History is strongly sexualized by what would be the illegitimate relationships between the servants and between the servant and the child. The protagonist, a single woman with a very repressive education, is very impressed and worried about those supposed stories of promiscuity (in the sense of the time). The aspect that distinguishes "Otra vuelta de tuerca", and turns it into the ghost story that marks a before and after in that genre, is the possibility of double reading and the ambivalent way in which it was conceived and written. The possibility of existence in itself of ghosts in history can be interpreted from, at least, two different forms. The element that provides this ambivalence of readings is the governess (translated as "the one who commands", "preceptor") who precisely "leads" us to and within history. It is necessary to understand that history would not be possible if it were not for the governess, the only narrative voice (with the exception of the beginning of the novel) by which we can know the facts from its sole point of view and interpretation. It is the governess who narrates the facts, the one who convinces us (or not) of the apparitions and, in some way, the one who creates them from nothing. At this point, the ghosts exist, manifest, exist inside or outside the head of the governess, do not exist? The answer would be affirmative and negative at the same time.

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