The Crackdown has been read by some analysts as a simple ghost story and by others as a psychologically accurate portrait – both pre- and post-Freudian – of mental illness or the explosion of repression. As fun as it is to consider Henry James's tale from any of these or similar points of view, I find it particularly interesting to consider it as a kind of metafiction, a story about storytelling that explores the power of language to create moods. or to evoke emotional or psychological responses through the power of suggestion. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In some ways this story and its opening setting are reminiscent of the almost archetypal scenario of children sitting in the dark telling disturbing stories. It also brings to mind a particular scene from the Wonderworks film adaptation of Lucy Maude Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. In that scene, the characters Anne Shirley and Diana Berry are alone together in a dark woods, and they begin reciting to each other all the chilling ghost stories they can remember and talking about how "delightfully scared" they are. In the novel, Anne confesses to her aunt that “Diana and I imagined that the woods were haunted. All the places around here are so... so... COMMON. We made it up just for our own entertainment. We started it in April. A haunted wood is so romantic… Oh, we imagined the most heartbreaking things” (Montgomery 229). Similarly, Henry James demonstrates in The Turn of the Screw a profound understanding of the pleasure that typically imaginative people derive from being frightened and, indeed, from frightening themselves. James's story is a kind of masterful meta-cooler that works on the reader's imagination while allowing the events recounted by the characters within the story to work on the imaginations of other characters, with effects that are sometimes obvious and other times ambiguous. Part of the ambiguity surrounding the story concerns whether the housekeeper who tells her story has actually frightened herself with ghosts and other observations that originate in her own mind. Her indirect reference to some then contemporary works of Victorian horror or Gothic suspense (The Mystery of Udolpho, Jane Eyre) could be a hint from the author about her or the story in which she finds herself. “Was there a 'secret' in Bly: a mystery of Udolpho or of a madman, an unmentionable relative held in unsuspecting isolation?” (James 312). Although the interpretation of the story and the question of its realism are debatable, it seems obvious that James intended, while telling a chilling story, also to explore the complicity of the imaginative audience member in creating the effect – the pleasant awe or terror – such i stories can convey. Whether these types of stories are true or not is less important than the effectiveness of the narrative style, whether the narrative elicits the desired response in listeners or readers. Of course, James occasionally uses rather heavy-handed means to evoke the nervous atmosphere of The Turn of the Screw, even beginning his story with a discussion of what makes a short story the kind of story that can keep listeners "sufficiently breathless " (James 291), what each subsequent “turn of the screw” gives her (James 292). Furthermore, the author asks his characters to offer their own comments on the emotional impact of their stories: Douglas dramatically refers to the “terribility” of the tale he is about to tell, even stating that it is “beyond everything.Nothing I know affects it,” compared to its “disturbing ugliness, horror and pain” (ibid). This is a pretty dramatic situation for a story that has yet to be revealed. Such characterization creates anticipation, prepares the reader for a strong response, and demands a reward. It's a bold step forward on James' part, since failing to provide sufficient emotional payoff could leave the author open to accusations of exaggeration or melodramatic superfluity. And speaking of the superfluous, throughout the story there is a constant repetition of emotionally evocative pejoratives such as terror, horror, strange, crazy, corrupt, etc., as well as the frequent use of exclamation marks and italics. The text itself seems emotionally manipulative, effect-oriented, and if the reader is unwilling or unable to go where the text apparently leads, the effect would certainly be, from the author's point of view, unfortunate and the story it would probably fail. satisfy. James leaves the reader with little reason to doubt that the profit he has established is coming. However, one of the author's primary means of manipulation in Turn of the Screw is delayed gratification. There is a lot of hesitation, withholding details after the insinuation of what is to come, inviting listeners into the story as well as readers of the story to let their imaginations flow into the empty spaces. Again, the author is not subtle about this at all; he cheekily points out the technique early on (James 297), in an exchange between Douglas, his secondary narrator—in the ordinal sense—and one of his listeners. Until now, Douglas had submitted his photo when someone asked a question. «And what did the former housekeeper die of? – of so much respectability?” Our friend's response was prompt. “It will come out. I won't get ahead of myself." "Excuse me, I thought that was just what you were doing." Later on the same page, after providing some more subtle detail, Douglas makes an innuendo, a reference to some unforeseen danger in the housekeeper's story, of which she was unaware at first but of which she “has learned. Tomorrow you will hear what she has learned.” for the benefit of the company, prompted him to insert" his provocative hypothesis about what was yet to enter the narrative. This prompts Douglas to stand up, turn his back on the audience and stoke the fire before going further with his tale, i.e. his setting up the housekeeper's tale. Although I count three main narratives in Turn of the Screw, nested like Babushka dolls, there are technically many more stories within stories in this complex narrative, and there are even more narrators mentioned than are given. , rather than summarized or referenced. Notably, Douglas begins his allusion to the story of the nameless housekeeper after at least two other narrators, Griffin and one other, have told their own ghost stories to the company, to varying effect. Within Douglas's story, there is the housekeeper's story, in which she talks about what she learns from Mrs. Grose and, even before that, of having heard her master tell her what she judged to be her pertinent story: “The he frankly recounted all his difficulty – that for several applicants the conditions had been prohibitive. Somehow they were simply afraid. It seemed boring – it seemed strange; and all the more because of its principal condition” (James 297). Meanwhile, Miles, the male entrusted to the housekeeper, has several opportunities for dialogue to tell his story, carefully tailored as it is by his distrust and clouded by the impressions and interpretations of the: 1981.