House Parties: The Role of Setting in White is for Witching and The Turn of the Screw Joshua Brandel 12th Grade

Both White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James are Gothic tales that share some traits in common with supernatural superstitions that remain popular today—ghosts, legends, and, of course, haunted houses. Rather than heavily featuring the genre’s most frequent instruments of evil, like men with knives and anonymous poisoners, Oyeyemi and James both use the houses in which their books are set to control the story. In this way, each author orchestrates a particular interpretation of horror.

Henry James’ story, featuring the psychological creepiness of a governess and her two young charges, takes place at the expansive English country manor of Bly. The estate seems nice enough at first, remembered as a “broad, clear front, its open windows and fresh curtains and a pair of maids looking out…the lawn and the bright flowers and the crunch of my wheels on the gravel and the clustered treetops over which the rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky” (James 7). However, Bly is further from blissful than it seems. The old mansion, in its medieval resplendence, looms over its small residents both with its imposing walls and its heavy air. The narrator describes,

This tower was one of a pair—square,...