Henry James - O Aperto do Parafuso

"For Christmas entertainment, New York's Colliers' Weekly proposed to Henry James (1843-1916) that he write 'a product of the times,' which immediately made him think of the most interesting project of gloomy narrative he had ever recorded and could be squeezed into the size of ten episodes to be published by the magazine between January and April 1898 (the book edition would appear a few months later). In his notebooks he states that the story — a 'simple, vague and undetailed sketch' — was told to him two years earlier by the Archbishop of Canterbury, 'between two cups of tea,' in turn heard from the mouth of a woman kept anonymous, and that this woman had heard it from a stranger.a
Later, scholars of James's literary work came to consider this genesis false and intended only 'to muddle the clues'; because it would be an impossible coincidence that an anonymous story, called "Temptation," published fifty years earlier in Frank Leslie's New York Journal, featured children psychologically abused by servants, and that one of these children was named Miles (like James's character), subjected to the wickedness of Peter Quin (who in James's novel appears in an identical position and with the name Peter Quint); set in a mansion on Harley Street, the same street where the governess in The Turn of the Screw is received by her employer; adding to all this Sigmund Freud describes, in Studies on Hysteria, the case of a Miss Lucy R., an English governess of two children in the outskirts of Vienna, a victim of hallucinations identical to those of the governess imagined by James, a consequence of a repressed passion for her employer. For a large number of James scholars, these are the true sources of The Turn of the Screw; but frequent are the attempts to find other ancestors to this novel by James, and to dismantle its ambiguities; To decide whether the story contains ghosts or is merely a hallucination of the governess, since only she sees them. Pietro Citati, in his book Il Male Assoluto, calls this game "an English national sport."