Humans in general, and artists especially, have a tendency to divide their ideas into opposing pairs: foreign and familiar, us and them, black and white, good and bad. This tendency, as seen in some of the examples I have given, can often be a detriment to thinking: it is common advice to view life in all its shades of grey rather than moving everything to one extreme or the other. But opposing poles can be a very useful literary technique, in which each side is defined in contrast to the other. Authors can often make readers understand what an idea or a character is by showing what it is not. This is a technique that seems to have fascinated Henry James. In “The Turn of the Screw” and “The Real Thing”, he doubles down on his doubling. In each story, there is a pair of characters divided by the classic contrast between male and female. In addition, the pair as a whole are contrasted against another man-woman pair who represent a different set of characteristics. On one side, there is Miles and Flora and the Monarchs; on the other side is Jessel and Quint and Miss Churm and Oronte. James uses these contrasting characters to better explore his themes of gender, class, and worldliness.

Though these pairs primarily serve to contrast each other, James is also interested in the contrast within each one between male and female. In many ways, these characters are archetypal: less men and women than representations of Man and Woman. Mrs Monarch looks like “a lady in a book”(James 232) and Major Monarch is so much larger than life that he can only model testosterone-heavy giants. Their relationship, also, is a kind of Platonic ideal, “a real marriage, an encouragement to the hesitating, a nut for pessimists to crack”(James 240). Miss Churm and Oronte similarly represent Male and Female in the abstract, by the same characteristics that make them opposite from the Monarchs, that is, their ability to become any man or woman that the artist wishes to draw. The narrator of “The Turn of the Screw” similarly shows little interest in the specifics of her charges, instead viewing them as the perfect forms of boyhood and girlhood. Flora is a “radiant image”(James 321) and Miles is often called, not by his own specific name, but simply as “the little gentleman”(James 322). The governess ignores any aspect of Miles that might take him away from her picture of boyhood: when he hears that he has gotten in trouble at school, she makes this flaw fit into her conception of what a male child should be. She is glad he has “spirit”: that is, “boys will be boys.” The ghosts also, in the way they relate to the other characters, seem more symbolic than specific: since the governess is a woman herself, Miss Jessel appears as her reflection and in her place, and the male ghost is most fixated on the male child, just as Miss Jessel primarily preys on Flora. In both these pairs, the male is the initiator. Quint is the first ghost to appear to the governess and the first one to die, eventually taking Jessel with him. Miles sets out his plan to sneak out in the middle of the night while Flora distracts the governess for him.

Since they each represent the same ideas about gender, it is worth looking at what it is that makes these pairs so different. The most telling difference is that the ghosts and the professional models represent the world of the ordinary, while the Monarchs and the children represent some kind of rarified and purified conception of the ideal. Ironically, in “The Turn of the Screw”, the ghosts seem more fleshly than the living children. They are defined by their basic lusts, which can be described as either animalistic or all too human. By being, as the governess believes, innocent of such desires, Miles and Flora transcend them. Three times in the text, the governess refers to them as angels, exalted spiritual beings that literally float above earthly concerns. The Monarchs have some of the same qualities: in some ways the story could more rightly be called “The Ideal Thing.” They have an essence that is integral to them, and that the earthier Churm and Oronte can only put on. When Oronte meets Miss Monarch, the narrator says he has the “rapt, pure gaze of the young Dante spellbound by the young Beatrice”(James 245). Miss Monarch does indeed have much of the same character as Beatrice in The Divine Comedy as an ethereal presence of transcendent beauty. This conflict between the worldly and the unworldly dominates the plots of each story. The Monarchs are such a headache for the narrator of “The Real Thing” because their perfection is so immutable. “I placed her in every conceivable position,” he says, “but she managed to obliterate the differences”(James 241). They come from a “haunting type”(James 242) that puts the narrator in mind of the idealized forms of Leonardo and Raphael, and nothing he does can make them seem ordinary. In “The Turn of the Screw”, the situation is almost opposite: the children’s perfection is far too mutable, so that the governess is terrified of their being dragged down into the mire of ordinary life. One of the most frightening signs of Quint’s influence is when Miles says he wants the governess to “Think me—for a change—BAD!” (James 369). He is no longer content to be simply and entirely good: ordinary people must have at least some badness in them. But the governess is afraid to let him become ordinary: she has a deep need to preserve her conception of him as an “angel child.” She talks of him being “contaminate[d]” (James 326), because she wants him to remain in the space of the idea and  the uncomplicated. That may be why his precocious condescension and flirtation to the governess are so disturbing. They interfere with his place in the story as a capital-C Child: instead, they make him more contradictory and complicated by contaminating him with adulthood. That contamination is what the ghosts represent: sex, sin, death, all the harshest realities of adulthood that the governess wants to protect Miles and Flora from. That ability to be contaminated is something the Monarchs cannot share: whatever change the illustrator tries to make to them, even when they are no longer modeling but scrubbing the floors, they remain unchangeably themselves.

What does change, at least outwardly, is the Monarchs’ social standing. That is an even clearer difference between the paired couples in these stories: the divide between the upper and lower classes. The ordinary world that the Monarchs and the children hang above is the grubby world of workaday life. An important part of the Monarchs’ essence is the social standing they lost but that still remains in their bearing: Major Monarch is “a perfect gentleman”(James 232). Even their name conjures up images of royal elegance and wealth. The narrator is uncomfortable with their presence in his shop, saying, “It was very odd to see such people apply for such poor pay. She looked as if she had ten thousand a year”(James 233). Miss Churm and Oronte fit into their position working for Cheapside much more snugly. James carefully renders Miss Churm’s lower-class Cockney dialect and Oronte’s impoverished immigrant background, the way he “wandered into England in search of a fortune” (James 246). Quint and Jessel show a different side of the lower class, embodying all the rich’s fears about presumption (Quint walks around in the master’s clothes) and unchecked desire for sex and drink (as witnessed in the explanation of Quint’s death.) Perhaps the children’s “innocence” has less to do with evil and more to do with poverty and desperation. They have leisure very different from the lifestyles of the working-poor models or the gross Mrs. Grose. They rarely have to leave their well-furnished estate, and have time to spend in games and reading. Or, as the governess fears, in being corrupted by the earthy influence of the ghosts. The Monarchs used to have this kind of luxury, but in their financial realities, there is very little to separate them from their peers. They pretend otherwise, in ways that show James is more critical of their high-class prejudices than the more worshipful narrator is. Mrs Monarch looks down on Miss Churm with something like disgust because she “didn’t think her tidy. For why else did she take pains “to say to me (it was going out of the way, for Mrs. Monarch), that she didn’t like dirty women?” (James 243). Perhaps it is not a virtue but a fault for the Monarchs that they cannot put away their well-bred identities: their elitism robs them of the adaptability that allows Churm and Oronte to thrive. Mrs Monarch’s condescending attitude is reflected as well in Miles’ treatment of the governess. Even though she is his superior in this situation, just as Churm and Oronte are the Monarchs’ peers in their situation, his class leads him to treat his governess as an equal or even an inferior. He believes he can do as he pleases without her knowing, and there is a note of condescension in his “You know, my dear,”(James 378) that is much more polite, but just as inappropriate as Miss Monarch’s estimation of Miss Churm as a dirty woman. In truth, it is not these characters’ corruption by the lower class that undoes them, but their upper-class pride. That is why Miles and Flora alienate their governess and engage in the mischief that makes her distrust them. And it is why the Monarchs cannot adapt to their new standing, eventually leading them to the ironic and total social reversal that James ends the story with.

Henry James writes these stories at least partially as explorations of opposites: to examine male in terms of female, worldliness in terms of unworldliness, and the upper class in terms of the lower. Notice that good and evil do not fit into this interpretation. That would be too simple for an author as thorny as James. They seem to be present somewhere in the ranges he explores, but it is not immediately obvious where. Maybe the earthy, dingy world of the ordinary destroys these characters, or maybe it is their rejection of it. In the labyrinthine complexity of his work, James makes “both” seem like a viable answer. In the end, his black and white contrasts only make the ambivalent shades of grey murkier and more intricate.