Joyce Carol Oates, "The Turn of the Screw"


1. The formal innovation of the bifurcated text makes for a challenging reading experience. Describe the different approaches a reader might take to reading such a narrative form, and explore how these different approaches might produce different understandings of the story.

2. Compare and contrast the two stories contained by the parallel texts. What do they have in common, what makes them distinct, and why is it crucial that they run side by side through the text?

3. The two columns conclude along similar lines. "Will I outlive him? Will I outlive all these old men?" and "In a lifetime there are few moments of such bliss." Explore the concept of "life" in "The Turn of the Screw." How is it connected to "death" and, alternately, "history"?

4. Oates has said that she thinks of writing "primarily as a gesture of sympathy." Discuss the nature of sympathy in "The Turn of the Screw." How is it evoked? Toward whom or for what exactly do the writer and the reader feel sympathy?

5. The original "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James is a story about "ghosts" haunting a household that includes two children. James himself said that herein "the strange and sinister is embroidered on the very type of the normal and the easy." Compare and contrast this statement as it applies to Oates' "The Turn of the Screw."