“Ghostly Ambiguity: Presuppositional Constructions in "The Turn of the Screw"

Description

The “Ghostly Ambiguity: Presuppositional Constructions in The Turn of the Screw” is an essay and it was written by two American literary critics: Helen Aristar Dry and Susan Kucinkas. This essay was initially published in 1991 in the 25^th issue of the academic journal of Style. The Journal of Style which mostly addresses questions of style, and publishes critiques in language, literature, and humanities belongs to the Penn State University, Pennsylvania, United States. The essay features “presuppositional constructions” (p. 73) as the quality of language to discuss the ghostly ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw. 

Summary

Dry and Kucinkas’s essay begins by making the position that narration in The Turn of the Screw is not only working to show the mod but it tends to be a subject itself. The writers mention the emphatic ambiguity highlighted by various critiques. The essay suggests that, in order to resolve the text ambiguity, “it's grounding in human sign systems” (p. 72) need to be examined. For that purpose, the authors underline the importance of language related to other behaviours and emphasise that the capability and validity of the governess as the narrator should be measured not only by the presented information but also through “the eccentricity of the discourse raises metalinguistic questions” (p. 72). The authors argue that the narration happens through “presuppositional constructions [which] introduce information into a discourse "as though" it were already known” (p. 74), therefore, underpins a “mutual assumption” (p. 73), between the narrator and the reader. 

The essay argues based on the foundation of presuppositional constructions and its implication of extracting “the "brand-new" information” (p. 77). The essay separates a passage of the story into several parentheses and shows that each of them outlines an “external action” (p. 78). For instance, the authors point out the sentence of ‘what arrested me’ from the story and argue that this expression functions as a “cleft sentence” (p. 79), in the way that it leads the reader to assume that the narrator is arrested by something, and the reader only needs to find out what that arrester is. Therefore, the information given through such sentence not only moves the plot forward but also provides an “assertion” (p. 80) about the governess's inner life. The essay concludes that presuppositional constructions in this story lead an equivocal situation of ambiguity through either depicting “the ghosts as assumed, not asserted” (p. 83) or by applying the eccentricities in the process of cooperation between teller and hearer. 

Evaluation
The analysis made by Dry and Kucinkas is important as it goes beyond the conventional discussions of the ambiguity in The Turn of the Screw, which mostly emphasised either the real existence of ghosts or merely considered it as a figment of the governess. This essay has responded to the primary text through disclosing the exploitation of linguistic resources and finds out that the “ambiguity derives from a feature of James’s syntax” (p. 83). The essay is relevant to the topic as it argues that the presuppositional constructions lead to depict the governess's inner life through a system of indirect discourse and thus cause ambiguity. 

Reference 
Dry, Helen Aristar., and Susan Kucinkas. “Ghostly Ambiguity: Presuppositional Constructions in "The Turn of the Screw".” In Style25, no. 1 (1991): 71-88. Accessed September 5, 2017. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/stable/42945884.