Regímenes Democráticos-Representativos

For Henry James, the darkness lurking in the background of Barrie’s fairy tale is brought to the forefront in both his psychological ghost story The Turn of the Screw (1898), and the less read, but perhaps more horrific, realistic novella The Author of Beltraffio (1884). If Peter Pan’s Wendy is dangerous because she wants Peter to grow up and rejoin normative time, the women in

The Turn of the Screw and The Author of Beltraffio are outright murderous. While I’m not

particularly interested in “recuperating” any of these texts by doing feminist readings of them (which, especially in the case of Peter Pan, seem like they would have to be, at best, a stretch), James’s novellas differ from Barrie’s Peter Pan texts in that they indict not just feminine sexuality, but the discourses of protection that, at their logical ends, insist that a dead child is better than a “corrupted” (or queer) child. When paired with James’s The Pupil (1891), these texts form what I think of as James’s “dead erotic child trilogy,” in which the death of the erotic child acts as consummation of the adult/child relationship.

The Turn of the Screw, the most well-known of these novellas, shares many common

themes with Peter Pan.xcv The novella begins with a young woman’s intrusion into a world of

children and domestic servants, and ends with her (probably) killing one of those children, in order to protect him from the ghosts that she believes are haunting them (although, since no one else ever sees these ghosts, it’s unclear whether they actually exist, or are just hallucinations).xcvi I read

these ghosts as representative of the unnamed Governess’s panic around Miles’s presumed sexual knowledge—she sees him as haunted by the specter of queerness, which may or may not relate to his relationship with Peter Quint, the dead valet whom the Governess sees haunting Miles.

accompany orphanhood—like the Lost Boys, they appear to have neither grief, memories, or even a last name that would connect them to the man and woman who must have produced them. Bly’s chief living inhabitants consist of a sexually repressed virgin who is (supposedly) in love with an absent and unattainable man, and a presumably childless, single or widowed woman past her reproductive prime.xcvii The one couple of childbearing age at Bly is present only in the form of

ghosts, rendering any sexuality attached to them sterile. Additionally, while the living Peter Quint and Miss Jessel may have been lovers, their sexuality, rife with hints of child-loving, violence, and queer attractions, seems more at home on an enchanted island than in the reproductive timeline of the mainland.

There is a fatality inherent in heterosexuality for both the citizens of Neverland and Bly. If the official villains of The Turn of the Screw and Peter Pan are Lost Men Quint and Hook, it does not take a particularly deep reading of either text for it to become apparent that the real villains are the supposed heroines—both the first white, non-working class female characters to appear in Neverlands previously inhabited by men, boys, “natives,” and servants. While the Governess identifies Quint as “the white face of damnation” (The Turn of the Screw 86), Miles’s last words tell a different story. “Whom do you mean by ‘he’?” the Governess demands, sure that if she can only get the boy to “surrender” the name, the demon will be vanquished. “Peter Quint—you devil!” Miles cries. It is not Quint whom the boy fears, but the Governess. The devil at Bly, the person who ultimately destroys its children, is not Quint, but the woman appointed to protect them. Whatever may occur between Miles and Quint and Peter and Hook, neither boy ever appears to be in any real danger at the hand of the older man. Death comes to Neverland and Bly only with the arrival of women who wish to place the enchanted queer islands back into their own conventional temporality.

To be possessed by a woman, for the boys of Neverland and Bly, is fatal. Miles, ostensibly being shielded from the queer specter the Governess sees beckoning him, ends up literally smothered by a woman’s embrace,on a night that is, significantly, likened to a wedding night. Describing her final dinner with Miles, the Governess compares their silence to that of “some young couple who, on their wedding journey, at the inn, feel shy in the presence of the waiter.” Dismissing her transgressive association as “whimsical,” the Governess attempts to finally discuss the matter that has obsessed her, his dismissal from school, with an “admirable, but not comfortable,” Miles. After she admits that she stays on at Bly only for the pleasure of his company, her voice trembling, Miles becomes “more and more visibly nervous” (80), although the Governess attributes this nervousness to something other than being left alone with a woman who has apparently driven his sister mad, and seems intent, now, on possessing him.

While the Governess appears to believe that she is battling to save Miles’s soul, the possession in question is less demonic, and more literal, physical. When she learns that Quint was “much too free” with Miles, the Governess feels “a sudden sickness of disgust,” but her response, “Too free with my boy?” (26, emphasis in original), seems to indicate that the problem is less that someone was “too free” with Miles, than that someone else may have considered him his boy. “There is not their equal on earth, and they are ours, ours!” Mr. Darling cries, in a moment of dramatic irony, before his children fly out the window and away (Peter Pan 11). Like Mr. Darling, or the comfort book authors in the first chapter, the Governess takes pride in the children, not as charges, but as possessions. “We were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I—well, I had them. It was in short a magnificent chance” (The Turn of

the Screw 27, emphasis in original). And this duel possession delights the Governess. The invasion

their protection. It is only when she sees that they may not want this protection that she becomes frantic. As Ellis Hanson points out, the ghosts, if real, are not inherently menacing, and the children, far from seeming “evil” or even “corrupt,” are in fact well-behaved, pleasant, and happy, until frightened out of that happiness not by their former, but by their current governess.

The Governess’s eagerness to view the ghosts as not just competitors for the children’s affection, but agents of sexual corruption, hints at the erotic impulses that appear under the surface of some comfort book authors’ delight in the eternal possession of their dead children. The titular key in Nehemiah Adam’s Agnes and the Little Key resembles not just a jailor’s key, but the key to chastity belt, and Agnes’ death, like Nell’s, Mary Hogarth’s, or Miles’s, is satisfying largely because it preserves her chastity and dubious innocence. When the Governess announces to a bewildered Mrs. Grose that the vague, nearly meaningless letter from Miles’s school, which says only that “should be impossible to keep him,” “ can have only one meaning” (10) she is participating in the same discourse as Adams, one that assumes that there is only one sort of harm that can come to a child: “corruption.” In the Governess’s declaration that Miles must be “an injury to the others!” injury only has one possible meaning, which has nothing to do with physical harm or emotional cruelty (11). To injure, to James’s Governess, means simply: “To corrupt” (12)—a term which, according to Eric Savoy, would, in Victorian England, have had an implication even more decidedly sexual than it does today.xcviii Our understanding of Miles’s expulsion from school

never gains any more clarity than these vague notions of “corruption” and forbidden knowledge. What, exactly, did Miles “say” at school? We are left only with his final interrogation by the Governess, with purposefully vague statements made under physical duress. After being shaken and ordered to provide an answer to the question of “What did you do?” Miles, in “vague pain,” admits the crime that got him expelled from school:

“Well – I said things.” “Only that?”

“They thought it was enough!” “To turn you out for?” . . . “Well, I suppose I oughtn’t.”

“But to whom did you say them” . . . “Was it to everyone?” . . . “No; it was only to – . . . I don’t remember their names.” “Were they then so many?”

“No – only a few. Those I liked.” . . . “And did they repeat what you said?” . . .

“Oh yes, . . . they must’ve repeated them. To those they liked.”xcix

Miles’s explanation only further confuses the Governess. “Those he liked?” she wonders. “I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure” (84). After wondering for a moment, in horror, whether or not she may have imagined the boy’s guilt in the first place, the Governess demands again that he tell her what, precisely, “were these things?” (86). His answer is stayed, however, by the Governess herself as, “with a single bound and an irrepressible cry,” she “spring[s] straight upon him” (86). The queer specter of Quint has appeared to her, both to stop the boy from answering and as answer to her question. If the revelation that Miles was expelled for “saying things” to “those he liked” sends the Governess further into darkness, it seems to us to be only because she lacks the narrative that would make sense of it. Or perhaps her confusion is deliberate, founded in the same attitude that she takes towards the ghosts, steeling herself for her final confrontation with Miles by willing herself to “shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature” (79, emphasis added).

According to D. A. Miller, texts that show homosexuality merely by implication will be “haunted by the phantasm of the thing itself.”c In The Turn of the Screw, that haunting is made

literal. Peter Quint becomes the personified specter of homosexuality that the governess sees haunting Miles, beckoning him to join. Quint and Miss Jessel have returned from the dead, according to the Governess, in order to possess Miles and Flora, respectively. She by this point intends the word in both its physical and supernatural meanings, declaring that the ghosts want the children “for the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put into them . . . to ply them with that evil still.” In response to Mrs. Grose’s question as to what two dead people could possibly do to the living, the Governess responds that Quint and Jessel can “destroy” the children. Seen only across distances, on towers, at the further edge of the lake, outside a window from inside, she says, the ghosts beckon to the children—“and the success of the tempters is only a question of time. They’ve only to keep to their suggestions of danger,” she says, for the children to yield, to come to them – “and perish in the attempt!” (48). These queer specters gaze at the children, summon them over “the long reach of [their] desire” (70)—but there is no indication that this desire frightens anyone other than the Governess.