A turn of the screw

“A turn of the screw” is the governess’s metaphor for meeting an apparently monstrous ordeal by intensifying ordinary human virtue. In the dining-room scene with Miles, the phrase reveals both her chosen method of endurance and the tension it cannot resolve: she tries to make the unnatural manageable by treating it as a familiar moral challenge.

Meaning in Context

The governess says she can continue only by taking “nature” into her confidence and account, and by regarding what she faces as an unusual and unpleasant push that demands “only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.” The expression makes endurance sound like a matter of degree: an ordinary virtue, tightened under extraordinary pressure. Yet the need to describe the ordeal as “against nature” exposes the inadequacy of that reassuring analogy. Her language domesticates the threat even as it registers how far it exceeds the ordinary.

The Dining-Room Scene

The phrase occurs as the governess waits to dine downstairs with Miles, without attendance. The room is the same one outside whose window she had earlier glimpsed something she could scarcely call light. That memory shadows her attempt to maintain a composed household routine: she has deliberately arranged the meal with the boy, while privately recognizing that her equilibrium depends on rigidly shutting her eyes to what she believes she must confront.

The ordinary details sharpen the strain. A joint of roast mutton stands on the table; Miles pauses with his hands in his pockets, apparently about to make a humorous judgment of it, then asks whether she is really very ill. In that intimate exchange, the governess sees an opportunity to reach his mind through his intelligence. Her metaphor therefore belongs not only to private self-command but also to her effort to find a way through silence and approach the child without plunging back into what she calls the hideous obscure.

Narrative Significance

The expression is powerful because it does not settle the nature of the danger. It casts the governess’s response as a moral exertion, but the phrase’s measured, almost practical image of tightening sits uneasily beside her description of an ordeal against nature. Her attempt to supply the “nature” missing from the situation becomes part of its paradox: she relies on ordinary virtue precisely because she cannot make the experience ordinary.

The wording also links the scene’s composed surface to its concealed pressure. Dinner, teaching, and Miles’s tactful intelligence offer familiar means of keeping life in order; the governess’s metaphor acknowledges how much force she believes is required to preserve that order. It does not explain the threat or prove her account of it. Instead, it gives the reader a compact expression of her method—and of the unresolved tension between moral self-discipline and supernatural interpretation.