Henry James succeeds in establishing "the tone of tragic yet exquisite mystification" in The Turn of the Screw (1898), making the story and his own remarks seem ambiguous. When the novel was adapted into the film The Innocents in 1961, director Jack Clayton managed to maintain the complex ambiguity built into the novel. This essay will use Freud and Crick's The Interpretation of Dreams (1999) as the main psychoanalytic theory to explore the meaning of the symbols that appeared in Miss Giddens' hallucinations and the inner motivation of her behaviours. Based on Freud's psychoanalytic theory, this essay defines the phenomenon encountered by Miss Giddens in The Innocents as a hallucination resulting from long-term sexual repression. Miss Giddens' long-suppressed religious and moral sexual urges are aroused by Mr Redgrave without being given a vent, which results in a gradual hallucination. Miss Giddens' hallucinations are filled with sexual symbolism and innuendo. Religious and moral repression causes her to feel fear and anxiety while failing to control her sexual imagination, which triggers the final behaviour of expulsion in the name of redeeming the children.

Kaihang Ma. An Exploration of the Symbolic Meaning of Miss Giddens' Imagination with Freudian Theory. Academic Journal of Humanities & Social Sciences (2023) Vol. 6, Issue 25: 155-161. https://doi.org/10.25236/AJHSS.2023.062524.

[1] RECCHIA, E. 1987. An eye for an I: adapting Henry James's 'The Turn of the screw' to the screen. Literature film quarterly., 15, 28-35.

[2] KAEL, P. 1962. "The Innocents", and what passes for experience. Film Quarterly, 15, 21-36.

[3] CROWTHER, B. 1961. The Innocents: film from James Tale is at two theatres. New York Times, 26. 

[4] PALMER, J. W. 1977. Cinematic ambiguity: James's "The Turn of the Screw" and Clayton's "The Innocents". Literature film quarterly, 5, 198-215.

[5] SLIDE, A. 1985. Fifty classic British films, 1932-1982: A pictorial record, Courier Corporation.

[6] ORR, L. 2009. James's the Turn of the Screw, Bloomsbury Publishing.

[7] SINYARD, N. 2019. Jack Clayton. Jack Clayton. Manchester University Press.

[8] FOUCAULT, M. 1990. The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 95.

[9] RAW, L. 2004. Hollywoodizing Henry James: Jack Clayton's the innocents (1961). The Henry James review, 25, 97-109.

[10] FREUD, S. 1965. New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis.

[11] DOWNING, C. 1975. Sigmund Freud and the Greek mythological tradition. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 43, 3-14.

[12] FREUD, S. 1997. Sexuality and the psychology of love, Simon and Schuster.

[13] ARNHEIM, R. 1953. Artistic symbols: Freudian and otherwise. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 12, 93-97.

[14] The Innocents. (1961). Directed by Clayton Jack. Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation.

[15] Freud, S., Strachey, J., Freud, A., Rothgeb, C. L., Richards, A., Strachey, A. & Tyson, A. 1953. The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, London, Hogarth Press.

[16] Schacter, D. L. 2009. Psychology, New York: Worth Publishers.

[17] Cherry, K. 2022. An overview of Sigmund Freud’s theories [Online]. VeryWellMind.com. [Accessed February 14 2022].

[18] Freud, S. 2012. The future of an illusion, Broadview Press.

[19] Snowden, R. 2006. Teach yourself Freud, McGraw-Hill.

[20] Freud, S. & Crick, J. 1999. The interpretation of dreams / Sigmund Freud; translated by Joyce Crick; with an introduction and notes by Ritchie Robertson, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

[21] BOAG, S. 2006. Freudian repression, the common view, and pathological science. Review of general psychology., 10, 74-86.

[22] Halttunen, K. 1988. "Through the cracked and fragmented self": William James and The Turn of the Screw. American Quarterly, 40, 472-490.

[23] Heilmann, A. & Llewellyn, M. 2010. Neo-Victorianism: the Victorians in the twenty-first century, 1999-2009, Springer.

[24] Pulham, P., Kohlke, M.-L. & Gutleben, C. 2012. Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, violence and degeneration in the re-imagined nineteenth century. Neo-Victorian Gothic and Spectral Sexuality in Colm Tóibín’s The Master. Brill.