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Henry James’ The Turn of The Screw is the kind of elite literary work reinterpreted again and again by critics and exhaustively discussed in countless English courses—so much so that recent literary criticism is often focused on the fact that so many interpretations of the novella exist.  This sense of intrigue surrounding the piece is understandable; James plays interesting and innovative games with the art of storytelling (using devices like a one-sided frame and a possibly unreliable narrator), and the work’s plot is full of ambiguities. Are the ghosts real?  Is the governess crazy?  Are the children innocent? With so many possible interpretations, the only interpretation that seems definite is that James meant for his story to spark thinking and dialogue, as indicated by his own writing concerning The Turn of the Screw.  James jokingly called the work, “this perfectly independent and irresponsible little fiction” (Renaux 3).  Perhaps in an effort to fuel “this critical controversy,” James was often quite self-deprecating about the story’s quality; “As F.W. Dupree confirms, … ‘he wrote and said many conflicting things about the story’” (Renaux 5).  To this extent, we understand that it is necessary to examine the story from many perspectives in order to unearth all possibilities of meaning.

For my purpose, I will be viewing James’ work as a part of the evolution of the cult of the child.  Looking at James’ twisting and turning tale through this particular frame, new and interesting possibilities develop. Though The Turn of the Screw is not seen as a typical piece of cult literature (nor should it be), the author is making a negative critical statement about cult members through his plot choices.  By taking a definitively cult-subscribing narrator—the unnamed governess—and placing her in the antithesis of a cult world, James is able to show the psychological battle that takes place when her perceptions do not match reality and, ultimately, the negative consequences of cult thinking.

To both show that the governess is an ideal cult follower and prove that the world depicted in The Turn of the Screw is the opposite of a cult world, I must fully develop a definition of the cult of the child for the purposes of this paper (understanding that the cult is an amorphous, broad term used to describe a number of schools of thought about childhood).  Placing James as a player in the evolution of the cult is an appropriate exercise due to the timeliness of his work—The Turn of the Screw was written in 1898, the same time period that Cult sentiments were popular. “Henry James is not, after all, an isolated phenomenon of literature—a lusus naturae. He was, consciously, a writer in a tradition” (Sheppard 3).  One tradition he was both aware and critical of was the Romantic child and its offshoot, the cult of the child.  The notion of the Romantic child first surfaced in the 1780s (Gubar Class Lecture). The Romantics in general believed that children were separate from adults in their innocence, closeness to God, closeness to nature, and in their freeness and flexibility. This way of thinking eventually transitioned, in the 19^th century, to the cult of the child (Gubar Class Lecture).  In a most basic definition, adherents to this new sect took the Romantic idea that the child was close to God and turned this child worship into a new kind of religion itself (Gubar Class Lecture). 

In his book The Cult of Childhood, George Boas helpfully describes many different cultists’ views of children and defines the cult as a form of  “cultural primitivism” in which the child replaces “primitive” people as the archetype of the Noble Savage.  The child is assumed to have “some, if not all, of the characteristics which had been attributed to the Noble Savage.  Above all there was a kind of intuitive wisdom in them as contrasted with [acquired] learning; second, a keener appreciation of beauty … of something called Nature; third, there was a greater sensitivity to moral values. …. Anti-intellectualism” (Boas 8). This provides a rough outline for my main areas of focus within the cult of the child—the revere for the anti-intellectualism of children and children’s innate morality and simplicity that stems from their innocence. 

Cultists see education as a “repressive force” (Boas 70) and insist that the only real knowledge is that which is innate and inborn.  This kind of knowledge permeates logically from the world around them; that is, without a greater understanding of the world (the evils in the world particularly), children take the things they observe in their surroundings and the concepts they are taught (morality particularly) at face value.  According to the cult, any extensive attempts to intellectualize children through formal education or otherwise would cause them to lose their innate wisdom, making the movement anti-intellectual.  Boas cites Ellen Key: “Children are ‘clear sighted in their simplicity’ and cannot reconcile what they are taught with what their teachers actually do” (Boas 75).  Key summarizes this concept of children as “simple, sincere, logical, sensual, religious… a wonderful human being unlike most adults.  As such he becomes a sort of ideal human being whom we should all attempt to emulate” (Boas 76).  This simplicity extends to their personal lives as well.  Cult children seem to exist in literature purely for the roles they play within adult lives—changing adults for the better, such as in The Little Colonel and Little Lord Fauntleroy, without indulging in a personal life of their own.  The opposite of the cult ideal child would then be one who has a life of his or her own, knowledge of the world, and intelligence gained through education.

This idea of the children’s simplicity—both in mind and personal life—resulting from their lack of education is tightly linked to their innocent morality.  Ghandi, as quoted by Boas, wrote, “‘Children are innocent, loving and benevolent by nature.  Evil comes in only when they become older’” (Boas 91).  The insinuation is that growing up leads to learning about worldly things.  Boas discusses this term “innocent” that is so ubiquitous in Cult literature.  “Infantile innocence was traditionally believed to be moral, not aesthetic.  The child, even when he inherited the guilt of Adam, was nevertheless innocent of any sin committed by himself as someone other than his primordial father” (Boas 100).  This great sense of natural morality and automatic innocence is also accompanied by an outwardly beautiful appearance. 

Cult literature spends considerable time singing the praises of children’s appearances, to the point that readers may question the authors’ motives.  However, in the cult world, it is also highly important that children be sexually innocent, perhaps part of the reason why children began to become so attractive in this time period.  In a time of increasing knowledge and worldliness among women, the child may have become the new spousal ideal in this way. “An important part of middle-class wifely ideal… was sexual innocence. For some men, this criterion was so important that their symbol of romantic perfection became the girl rather than the woman” (Nelson 20). While it may seem ironic that naïveté be considered a sexually attractive quality, cultists were so deeply transfixed by the beauty of innocence that it was almost natural for them to sensualize and subsequently sexualize that aspect of childhood.  Therefore, it was prevalent for cult authors to do the same, or, at least, to unknowingly eroticize children.  Though these abstract ideas of anti-intellectualism, innocent simplicity, and sexualization help us understand the cult of the child as a more general whole, it is also important to briefly acknowledge a few themes and characters that show up again and again in cult literature and that have come to symbolically represent its ideals.

Throughout the cult literature studied in our course, women are repeatedly infantilized and men are made into child-loving bachelors.  The mothers in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Anne Fellows Johnston’s The Little Colonel are described as young and childlike, reliant on their child to get them through difficult times or replace their absent love interest.   Hodgson Burnett depicts a meeting between Fauntleroy and his mother as that of two child lovers—“The little figure dashed up the steps; another figure—a little figure too, slender and young in its black gown—ran to meet it.  It seemed as though they flew together, as Fauntleroy leaped into his mother’s arms, hanging about her neck and covering her sweet young face with kisses” (92).  The bachelor appears in the previous novels as an older family member irrevocably changed for the better by the child’s positive influence.  In Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, the bachelor appears in multiple forms—as the kind schoolmaster who helps Nell and her grandfather, the interested narrator in the beginning of the novel, and the two specifically-named bachelors Nell befriends.  In each case, the male character has a fondness for children or Nell in particular; they are unable to resist her charms. 

The final thematic element prevalent in Cult literature is the dying child.  The Old Curiosity Shop has the best and perhaps best-known version of this in Little Nell’s death at the end of the novel:  “She was dead.  No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon.  She seemed a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life; not one who had lived and suffered death” (Dickens 538).  In her book The Shape of Fear, Susan Navarette discusses Nell’s idyllic death scene as the prime example of this late-Victorian obsession with childhood death. “The ardor with which the Victorians celebrated childhood was to be matched only by the fervor with which they celebrated the hour of death, and the intersection of the two—the cult of childhood and the ars moriendi provided for some of the most affective deathbed scenes in Victorian literature” (Navarette 118).  Children in Cult literature are so idealized, so pure in their simplicity and innocence, that often authors cannot allow them to age and lose these qualities.  This is why dying children are so prevalent; the dying child can never grow up and disappoint her admirers with the unattractiveness that comes with increasing age, education, and worldliness. 

With a more definite idea of the cult of the child as an anti-intellectual movement in literature that uplifts children as bastions of innocence, simplicity, and (unknowing) sexualization and often features childlike women, child-loving bachelors, and childhood death, I can now examine how the Turn of the Screw governess is an ideal cult follower. From her mere physical description (brief though it may be), the governess seems to fit the cult standard of a childlike woman.  Mrs. Grose, discussing the last governess, begins, “She was also young and pretty—almost as young and almost as pretty, miss, even as you’” (James 12).  More important, however, are the governess’s feelings towards the children. Though the break down of these initial views of the children will be specifically documented later, I hope to place the governess as a cult of the child follower by noting the preconceived notions of childhood she automatically heaves upon the children when she enters her situation at Bly.  The governess is immediately entranced with Flora: “The little girl who accompanied Mrs. Grose appeared to me on the spot a creature so charming as to make it a great fortune to have to do with her… She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen” (James 7).  Though the governess’s first knowledge of Miles is concerned with his expulsion from school, she dismisses all possibility of his guilt or badness upon first viewing him, noting “What I then and there took him to my heart for was something divine that I have never found to the same degree in any child—his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love.  It would have been impossible to carry a bad name with a greater sweetness of innocence” (James 13).  Such a beautiful, young child must be a moral innocent, according to the governess’s cult ideals. The governess continues to effusively praise the children’s beauty, and this leads her to a natural cult assumption that innocence innately stems from this physicality. 

Furthermore, the governess believes the children to exist only for her; that is, she sees in them the simplicity that cultists prescribe for children, the lack of an inner life. She is ready to accept Miles’s simple nature (despite his expulsion from school) when she states, “I remember feeling with Miles in especial as if he had had, as it were, no history.  We expect of a small child a scant one, but there was in this beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive, yet extraordinarily happy, that, more than in any creature of his age I have seen, struck me as beginning anew each day” (James 19).  True to her cult thinking, the governess perceives the children as simplistic in their personal lives and, even further, emotionally and intellectually simplistic as well.  Miles is so uncomplicated that he is able to be blissfully happy each day, unburdened by the worries that come with intellect and maturity.  The governess sees no reason she should send Miles back to school (to increase his knowledge) when he is in such a content state.  For the governess, these notions of the children as simple, anti-intellectual beings go beyond mere observation; the simplicity of the children is implicit in her happiness and mental stability at Bly (as will be later evidenced). 

The governess is so enamored with the children that, as further proof of her cult status, she begins to eroticize her relationship with Miles.  This initially emerges when she and Mrs. Grose are first discussing Miles and the conversation shifts to the children’s uncle’s preference in nannies.  There is a confusion of pronouns when Mrs. Gross states that young and pretty “‘was the way he liked everyone!’ She had no sooner spoken indeed than she caught herself up. ‘I mean that’s his way—the master’s.’ I was struck. ‘But of whom did you speak first?’ She looked blank, but she colored, ‘Why, of him.’ ‘Of the master?’ ‘Of who else?’” (12).  The implied suggestion of Miles as a possible person who prefers his governesses “young and pretty” is immediately sexualizing him—placing upon him a more adult preference.  This is only heightened as the novella progresses, with the governess clinging to her views of the children as perfectly innocent and beautiful. Even when Miles confesses to her that he may indeed be “bad,” she displays her affection: “I shall never forget the sweetness and gaiety with which he brought out the word, nor how, on top of it, he bent forward and kissed me.  It was practically the end of everything. I met his kiss and I had to make, while I folded him for a minute in my arms, the most stupendous effort not to cry” (46).  What should be a scene between an adult and a child, a maternal figure and a helpless innocent, in actuality plays much like a love scene; this harkens back to the love scene between Fauntleroy and his mother.  Though the governess herself never makes any revelations concerning her intimate relationship with Miles, he certainly recognizes her feelings when he tells her, “‘You know, my dear, that for a fellow to be with a lady always—!’ … ‘And always with the same lady?’ I returned. … ‘Ah, of course, she’s a jolly, ‘perfect’ lady; but, after all, I’m a fellow, don’t you see? That’s—well, getting on’” (54).  As Miles notes, the governess is utterly obsessed with him (in a more sexual manner) as well as with Flora (more maternally) exactly in the way that a follower of the cult of the child should be; however, this in the world of the novella, her cult sentiments are not accepted as they would be in a typical cult narrative. 

The governess fulfills her cult duties by her physicality, her worship of the beauty and simplicity of children, and her tendency towards eroticizing them.  It is the world around her that causes the real points of dissonance in The Turn of the Screw.  If you consider, from a cult perspective, the governess as normal, then her environment is the opposite:

The narrator (as we might in our slipshod phrasing express it) is ‘a thoroughly normal young girl’, except for her extra qualifications of prettiness (to which Mrs. Grose testifies), cleverness (as assessed by an undergraduate of Trinity), and attractive personality (which Mrs. Grose, little Miles, and Douglas each in their several ways attest)—a normal young girl placed in a completely abnormal situation (Sheppard 17). 

 

Looking from a cult perspective, the governess’s situation is more than abnormal.  James made explicit efforts to place his narrator in a world where nothing happens as she thinks it will, where her deeply-rooted beliefs in the innocence and beauty of children begin to be challenged when the reality of her situation gets in the way.  I argue that James specifically and meticulously crafted a story where he would place this cult-subscribing narrator into the antithesis of a cult of the child world.  In doing so, James not only created a terrifying and compelling ghost story, but he also made a critique about the negative results of such cult thinking. 

            James’ critique begins with his portrayal of a typical cult character—the child-loving bachelor.  In James’s tale, no such friendly male counterpart exists.  The first bachelor that we meet, in fact—Flora’s and Miles’s uncle—wants absolutely nothing to do with the children.  The first narrator begins the description of this man—“a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of his life, such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel” (James 4).  Everything seems set up for a perfect cult narrative; there is a bachelor, the kind of man who might have existed in an old novel such as The Old Curiosity Shop or The Little Colonel.  However, this particular “bachelor” tells the governess, after putting her in charge of his niece and nephew, “that she should never trouble him—but never, never: neither appeal nor complain nor write; only meet all questions herself, receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and let him alone” (James 6).  This plants a seed of doubt, from the outset of the novel, that James may not be following all the rules we expect him to.  This doubt becomes stronger when we examine the logic behind the bachelor’s wish to be completely separate from the children.  From a modern perspective, the reasoning seems quite clear—the uncle wants his own life and never wished for the children to be a part of it.  Due to the death of their parents, they were thrust upon him; however, an 1898 cultist would find the addition of such young children a joyful (and possibly transformative) boon.  With no answer on the subject from the actual text, I argue the possibility of several options: James could be offering a hint that the children are not the typical cult innocents and therefore hold no attraction for their bachelor uncle (and in fact repel him) or he could be criticizing the way that cultists assume every male to be completely entranced by children.  Viewing the novella as a ghost story, one might be able to make a better case for the former—it gives the work an ominous tone while still continuing the anti-cult theme.  Regardless, the lack of interest from their uncle eliminates his physical presence from the story thereby providing the reader and the governess with more opportunity to analyze Miles and Flora.

            Unlike any normal cult narrative and in opposition to the governess’s first inclinations, in this reading, the children in The Turn of the Screw are not innocents.  They are far more complicated, intelligent, and secretive with their inner lives than cult children; it is when the governess realizes that the children may have lives of their own that she begins to suspect them to be evil or conspiring with the ghosts (part of her own sanity being stripped away along with her contradicting cult beliefs).   The children do uphold the requirement of beauty befitting a cult child, but their physical appearances along with their general demeanor are façades that initially trick the governess into believing them fitting of her cultish expectations.  Though this kind of claim may be difficult to see at the beginning of the work, this is simply because the children have hardly been given a voice.  By looking at the changing ways the governess perceives the children as the novella progresses (because she is our narrator and filter), a true characterization of Flora and Miles as anti-cult can be developed. 

The first part of the governess’s narration is dedicated to describing the children’s beauty and her happiness with her situation (presumably because she believes the children fit so well into her cultish views).  We first see the governess’s faith in the children begin to falter when she attempts to find out why Miles was expelled from school.  It is telling of her mental state to note that this is before the governess has ever viewed the boy; without his physical beauty upholding her cult beliefs, it is easier for the governess to doubt him. In the scene, Mrs. Grose quickly jumps to Miles’s defense questioning how he could possibly do anyone harm; the governess feels compelled to reply: “I found myself, to meet my friend the better, offering it, on the spot, sarcastically.  ‘To his poor little innocent mates!’ ‘It’s too dreadful,’ cried Mrs. Grose, ‘to say such cruel things! Why, he’s scarce ten years old!’ ‘Yes, yes; it would be incredible’” (James 11).  Though the governess appears more cynically questioning than Mrs. Grose, sarcastically doubting Miles’s innocence, both ultimately conclude that it would be “incredible” that he do any bad due to his young age (even before she meets him).  This initial doubt seems to completely disappear once the governess sees Miles, who she describes with effusive praise concerning his beauty, using words like “freshness” and “purity” (James 13).  (Throughout the novella, the governess dwells on this physical beauty as a way to ignore Miles and Flora’s un-cult behavior.) The governess immediately throws out the possibility of Miles doing wrong—“It doesn’t live an instant. My dear woman, look at him!” she tells Mrs. Grose (13).  Despite this reversion back to her old cult beliefs, spurred by Miles’s physical beauty, the possibility for doubt remains; Miles still has a questionable past, even if the governess chooses to forget about it in lieu of allowing him to satisfy her cult expectations.

            This characterization of the children is hardly complete.  The first break in Miles’s perfect cult identity has already appeared—could he have possibly done something bad, something with malicious intent upon others?  Even so, the governess seems content—at least for a while—with the children. However, after the first two appearances of Quint and the governess’s sighting of Miss Jessel while Flora is present, a new chapter in the governess’s view of Miles and Flora begins.  The governess exclaims to Mrs. Grose, “They know—it’s too monstrous: they know, they know!” (29).   The importance here is that the governess begins to believe that the children know about the ghosts after Mrs. Grose has told her about the children’s past with Quint. The governess is simply unable to understand that the children could have a past when she previously thought them without history. In the governess’s attempt to reconcile the fact that these children had a past—a sordid one if Mrs. Grose’s accusation of Quint being “too free” with Miles is any indication (26)—she decides that they must be in on the dealings of these threatening ghosts; Miles and Flora must be evil.  There is something both cult-like and anti-cult in this idea of breaking down and corrupting children, for “how can creatures exhibiting such graces have become and be, in actuality bad?  As every theologian knows, corruptio optimi pessima, ‘the corruption of the best is the worst corruption’, or as Shakespeare more picturesquely expresses it, ‘lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds’” (Sheppard 18).  Much like the woman in the beginning of the novella finds the idea of children haunted by ghosts to be “delicious” (James 2), James’ late-Victorian audience may have derived some pleasure from the horror of their pristine view of children being somehow corrupted (though overall the sentiment may seem anti-cult).

However, the larger point here is not whether or not the children really are evil in the sense that the governess perceives them to be (monstrously privy to the dealings of the undead, made corrupt by Quint’s and Jessel’s poison influences); the focus should be put on the fact that, in a very anti-cult way, these children have inner lives and a past.  Anytime the governess suspects the children of talking among themselves or not including her in their plans, she concludes they must be in communion with the ghosts.  As a cult follower, the governess wishes for them to be simplistic beings that she can wholly know, and the realization that Miles and Flora are something more pushes her mind to its limits.  This also speaks to the ghost’s place within this anti-cult world.  While it is not necessary to this reading to state if they actually exist or are merely the governess’s mental creations, they equally function to further the anti-cult nature of the world of The Turn of the Screw.  If real, the ghosts are additional reminders of that which really horrifies the governess—the children’s histories and their personal lives that she knows nothing about.  If they do not exist in reality, the ghosts are the governess’s mental manifestation of this same fear.  The appearance of the ghosts and the governess’s view of them in connection with the children further the characterization of Miles and Flora as antithetical to the cult; the ghosts represent the children’s history and ability to have personal lives apart from the governess, two concepts that the governess is not capable of comprehending due to her cult way of thinking.  As the children appear to be less and less innocently simplistic and more and more intellectually complex, the governess begins to further unwind.

The intelligence of the children becomes apparent to the reader once they are finally given a voice.  It is not until Chapter 11, page 46 out of 87, that James (or the governess herself) deems fit to allow Miles to speak for himself concerning his trip outside in the middle of the night.  This moment comes as a kind of shock, both because the reader realizes that Miles has never had a line of dialogue before and because the way he expresses himself makes us aware of his intellect:  “Think me—for a change—bad! … When I’m bad I am bad!” Miles plainly tells the governess (James 46).  It seems we can take Miles’s words as truth—he admits that the reason he got up in the middle of the night was to play a prank on her.   This is an example of the children’s patronization of the governess. In the way that they are able to perceive what she expects of them and act accordingly if they wish to placate her or disobey if they have gotten tired of pretense (such as Flora’s outburst by the lake, “I think you’re cruel. I don’t like you!” (71)), the children display a great deal of mature intelligence.  Again, this contradicts the cult view of anti-intellectualism; a cult child should never have the advanced ability to purposefully manipulate an adult’s feelings without the adult’s knowledge.  In this way, Miles for the most part (and to a lesser extent, Flora) act superior and even more adult than the governess.  Miles consistently calls her the quasi-demeaning pet name, “my dear” (54), which speaks to more of a relationship between equals than that of child and adult.  After Miles’s initial confession that he is indeed “bad,” the governess seems to see some truth in the matter when she discusses it with Mrs. Gross: “‘Why, of the very things that have delight, fascinated, and yet, at bottom, as I now so strangely see, mystified and troubled me.  Their more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness. It’s a game,’ I went on; ‘it’s a policy and a fraud!’ (47).  In this instance, the governess states that her cult of the child views have been incorrect and that the children have been acting all along, patronizing her and hiding their actual lives.  However, her revelation does not stick; the governess’s cult feelings are too strong to be completely held away.  For the rest of the novella, as she attempts to come to terms with the breakdown of her worldview, the governess goes back and forth between believing the children good and evil.  Flora’s outburst eventually causes the governess to send Flora away and to attempt to get the truth from Miles.  This final confrontation—when the governess seems finally convinced of the children’s real, anti-cult identities and their characterization as non-innocents is complete—ultimately results in Miles’s death, an event that may seem cult-like but in reality is the opposite.

In a cult world, children die in romantic, idealized ways, but death is represented conversely in James’s world.  First, though Miles dies, it is the opposite of a traditional cult child death, because there is no peace, calm, or eternally-preserved innocence.  Miles does not have a sense of purity that James is trying desperately to cling to by killing him off before it leaves; the child is already maturely intelligent and worldly. In fact, it seems that his death—an apparent heart attack of some kind—is directly related to the pressure the governess places on him to explain why he does not fit her cult expectations.  Desperate to reconcile her previously-held cult beliefs with a negating world that shatters them at every turn, the governess is pushed to her limit when cross-examining Miles about his crimes.  Throughout the scene, the governess is grappling between her tender feelings for the child stemming naturally from her cult tendencies and the knowledge that he has lied, stolen, and perhaps done even more dubious acts than she knows.  “My hands—but it was for pure tenderness—shook him as if to ask him why, if it was all for nothing, he had condemned me to months of torment. ‘What then did you do?’” (James 85).  Her descriptions become increasingly violent—“that movement made me, with a single bound and an irrepressible cry, spring straight upon him” (86).  In her fervor for some kind of mental stability, for comprehending the world around her that does not fit into any of her Cult mindsets, the governess ends up killing the object of her cult adoration.  When she believes she sees Quint, the governess shouts: “‘No more, no more, no more!’ I shrieked, as I tried to press [Miles] against me, to my visitant” (86).  This act of desperation may be the one that kills Miles, as he screams, “‘Peter Quint—you devil! … Where?’ Miles’s dying pronouncement proves horrific at least in part because it conveys a truth—if it can be said, that is, to convey anything definitive—that seems grossly antithetical to those expressed by the dying innocents so ubiquitous in Victorian literature” (Navarette 122).  Miles appeals to the dead Quint, calling him a “devil” and presumably admitting that either his ghost is there or that his negative influence has been so entrenched upon the boy that he realizes it is the reason for his demise (the reason that he does not fit cult standards). Descriptions are all ambiguous, but it is clear that the governess becomes more and more animated and violent, and Miles cannot handle the strain whether physical or emotional.  There is a definite moral here—finally we understand the statement that James is making about those who desperately cling to the ideals of the cult of the child.  In this case, it only leads to pain, eventual madness for the governess, and death of the object of that mania, Miles.

While Miles’s anti-cult death makes a strong statement about the negative consequences of an illogical obsession with children as beautiful innocents, his is not the only death in the novella.  Even further, death seems to follow and surround the children (perhaps another reason why the bachelor wants nothing to do with them). While I agree that “…the narrative is written in response to Miles’s death,” it is the other deaths in the novella that make it most interesting—“it describes the return of the dead servants…Each of the deaths contributes to the legendary ambiguity of the tale” (Cutting 6).   The death count in this story includes the children’s parents, the governess’s (Douglas mentions that she has died since giving him the manuscript on page 5), Quint, Mrs. Jessel, and finally Miles himself.  Children in cult narratives often die themselves, but inciting death among those around them is opposite to their usual purpose; cult children are generally means of reaffirming life, not taking it away (as evidenced by Little Lord Fauntleroy and The Little Colonel where the children increase the liveliness and vivacity of their aging grandfathers).  Though a child does die in this story, it is not in the traditional cult fashion.  In fact, the focus is not on the children dying themselves but the death that surrounds and even follows them.

            Overall, all these small pieces that oppose the cult add up to create one horrifying environment for a governess so fully ingrained with the cult mentality.  This is James’s ultimate critique of the cult of the child: it cannot come to terms with children who do not absolutely fulfill its requirements of innocence, simplicity, and anti-intellectualism.  In this case, the children who do so are assumed to be evil conspirators with the undead; they simply cannot be normal children.  James has carefully crafted a tale where he can showcase the disintegration of the cult viewpoint, as embodied by the narrator.  Because of her admiration for the children’s beauty and simplicity, she cannot maintain sanity when she sees that these aspects were false all along.  She is placed in a world where bachelors avoid children at all costs, the children themselves become less and less innocent before her eyes, and death seems to follow them at every turn.  Combined, these environmental factors are James’s way of stretching the outlines of the cult to the breaking point, showing that when they do break (by being introduced to a stark, opposing reality), the result is insanity and death.

 

Work Cited

Boas, George. The Cult of Childhood. London: The Warburg Institute, 1966.

Cutting, Andrew. “Introduction.” Death in Henry James. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 1-18.

Dickens, Charles.  The Old Curiosity Shop. London: Penguin Books, 2000.

Fellows Johnston, Annie. The Little Colonel. Gretna: Firebird Press, 1998.

Gubar, Marah.  Class Lecture.  Englit 1900. Oct. 30, 2008.

Hodgson Burnett, Frances. Little Lord Fauntleroy. Mineola: Dover, 2002.

James, Henry.  The Turn of the Screw. New York: Dover, 1991.

Navarette, Susan J.  “Unsealing Sense in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.” The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siècle Culture of Decadence. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998.  110-139.

Nelson, Claudia.  Family Ties in Victorian England. Westport: Praeger, 2007.

Renaux, Sigrid.  The Turn of the Screw. New York: Peter Lang, 1993.

Sheppard, E. A. Henry James and the Turn of the Screw. Suffolk: The Chaucer Press, 1974.