In this review of Turn of the Screw, the author uses a feminist conceptual framework to critique the narrative. This entails, firstly, identifying how women are portrayed in the story, and, secondly, critiquing the normativities that are advanced in the story. In the case of the first point, therefore, women, such as the main character of the governess, are portrayed as subjugated to male patriarchy. Secondly, the norms are critiqued on the basis that “purity” cannot be understood as a universal virtue, but rather is a patriarchal view of women and the world, and, furthermore, that all individuals are complex mix of moral qualities, therefore their simple classification as good or bad is inherently flawed.
Whereas such critiques may have one seemed radical and new, they have become so commonplace that any effectivity they have had has long been lost. With regard to the critique of the good governess, this could, contrarily, be interpreted as a strong female character who represents the author’s intended positive normativities. The author of the review takes a feminist approach, which means that the feminist character must be submitted to a reading of her good qualities from the perspective of her subjugation to the male. Secondly, the author of the review gives the simplistic critique that virtues such as purity do not capture the complexity of our world. However, this is merely a form of moral and ethical relativism which is all too prevalent in the postmodern world and which has led to a failure of the intellectual and academic communities of the West, for example, to effectively mobilize themselves to prevent atrocities committed by the West against the world, such as the U.S.’s invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, etc.
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"Turn Of The Screw Summary".
The Turn of the Screw should instead be viewed as a rarity in our postmodern world: a story which possesses a clear ethical narrative, without any typical ambiguities, but opposes oppression, not along the particularities of gender, but according to truly universal norms and principles.
