Pedophilia,

Panic And The Erotic Child in Henry James

and Benjamin Britten’s “The Turn Of The Screw”.

“The Turn Of The Screw” is a Gothic novella written by Henry James
presumably in 1897 and published a year after for the first time in the “Collier’s
Weekly”, there have been many adaptations of the “The Turn Of The Screw”,
including Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Accursed Inhabitants Of The House Of Bly”
and a very famous Capote’s movie “The Innocents” (1961), without counting the
countless other less famous movie and TV series’s adaptations (two of them are
very recent, one of them from this year), it has also inspired numerous other
works. But the most important adaptation remains composer Benjamin Britten’s
1954 opera “The Turn Of The Screw”, with a libretto by Myfawny Piper. It was
almost universally acclaimed after its debut and it is now recognized as a classic.
There have also been countless analyses, particularly of the novel, and since
1938, thanks to the very famous interpretation of Edmund Wilson who first
expressed the idea that the ghosts aren’t actually real but created by the
governess’s mind, and that the reason of her visions can be traced back to her
sexual repression there has been an ardent debate between so called
apparitionists and anti-apparitionists. It also gave rise to great amounts of
psychoanalytic interpretations of the novel.
In recent years, there have been also feminist and queer interpretations of the
novel.
Most of the analyses of “The Turn Of The Screw” are about sexuality,
particularly neglected forms of sexuality like female sexuality and childhood
sexuality, considering most of the characters of both the book and the opera are
women and children, with the exception of Peter Quint (a ghost) and the
children’s uncle (who only appears at the beginning and is totally absent during
the narration, he is only talked about).
The book, according to my interpretation, centers the young governess’s panic
and fear about Miles’s and Flora’s sexuality, particularly what happened when
the former governess Miss Jessel and especially the former valet Peter Quint
were left in charge of Bly, and in the case of Miles also what was the “cruel
charge” that made his prestigious school decide that they had to the expel him.
While she tries to extort a confession about the deviant and unspeakable
behavior these supposedly innocent children were supposed to have engaged in,
she also needs to confront her own sexual desires and particularly her own
eroticization of her young charges. I largely base myself on scholar James
Kincaid’s theories about child molestation panics and the erotic child in both the
Victorian era and our’s, that are similar in some aspects but differ in some others.
As Stockton, herself drawing on Kincaid’s work said, “detailed narratives of
child molestation, which the press is full of, allow “normal” citizens what they
seem to seek: “righteous, guilt-free…pornographic fantasies” about the violation
of a child’s innocence”[1], ultimately, what the governess seeks is the detail about
what exactly Miles, Flora and “the others” got up to, and what Miles did at
school. When Miles finally, in what resembles a trial (We’ll go in more detail
later about the associations between James’s work and the Oscar Wilde trial), is
pressured by her into admitting he said “things to those he liked” whom they
repeated to “those they liked”, an extremely clear, despite what other scholars
have said, admission to sexual conduct (or at least talk) with other boys at
school, she is not satisfied despite for sure understanding what it meant, even if
she denies it (We will see later that she has quite an understanding of the going
ons of all boys schools, despite being a pure, Christian “young woman privately
bred”, making her pretense of not understanding what Miles meant by that even
more telling), she wants him to tell her exactly what those things were.
Ultimately she, and we’ll, never know. But what is on the contrary, up to see for
any reader is ironically, the flirtation between her and Miles that comes exactly
before what I called the “trial” scene, and that even her understands in her
comment about how “they shouldn’t like” being left alone together. It is exactly
before the trial scene that she compares Miles to a shy groom and herself to a
bride in an often quoted passage. That is one of the most important examples
about how in the novel, she, through her panic about child molestation and
sexuality, ends up herself in the role of the pedophile (Literally gazing as Quint
did, as she says in a passage) that threatens the child’s so called “innocence”,
even rationalizing on that in the manner of one, by saying that if Miles can be
called innocent, what is she to be called, then?
There is also Britten’s opera. We will have to concentrate first on James’s work
(and two other of his works), and then on Britten’s opera, also considering that
the literature about the two works is quite different. We’ll also concentrate on
aspects of both and on their differences and similitudes.

Gender in The Turn Of The Screw (1898).

Gender in “The Turn” has not been wholly neglected by scholars, but in this
section I would prefer to analyze some neglected aspects of how gender informs
James’s book. Particularly, the gendered identity of the governess and how
gender informs Quint and Jessel’s characters and hauntings of the children
respectively. There will also be some comments on Miles’s and Flora’s
differences, we will see particularly how their future is geared towards difference
while their present towards similarity, and the gendered difference in how boys’s
relations with men are conceived as opposed to girls’s relations with women, and
also the gendered differences in how children’s relations with women are
conceived as opposed to children’s relations with men. There will be also a small
focus on age differences that will be analyzed in more detail in another section.

At the beginning of the story, we see the governess’s gender identity defined as
normative, she is the typical Victorian young woman or better, “girl” as the
novel calls her at twenty years old and as we see in our culture countless times,
of course no male equivalent exist of the tendency of calling adult men “boys”
expect in very specific contexts, the word “boy” being an insult when directed to
an adult man[2], and even a slur when directed to a black man[3]. She is painted
as having a normative attraction towards the “handsome and bold” patriarchal
uncle of the children to whom she “succumbs” (that I will explore more in
another section), him being portrayed on the contrary as the perfect example of
Victorian hegemonic masculinity. Him “vast and imposing”, her a “fluttered,
anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage” who has only seen a man like that in
novels or dreams. The uncle’s masculinity is defined is terms of richness,
independence and heterosexuality: “She conceived him as rich, but as fearfully
extravagant—saw him all in a glow of high fashion, of good looks, of expensive
habits, of charming ways with women. He had for his own town residence a big
house filled with the spoils of travel and the trophies of the chase”. He also has
no time for child care and wants to be completely excluded by Bly which is
defined as the space of women and children: “These children were, by the
strangest of chances for a man in his position—a lone man without the right sort
of experience or a grain of patience—very heavily on his hands”, the unnamed
governess is first moved to accept his offer by the fact that she surely herself
understands that, and even pity for the fact that he sometimes had to go himself
to Bly, as the former employers of the house of Bly the majority he names are
women, naming Jessel but not Quint, because it is defined as a female space, of
whom he even is in panic of being associated with, prompting the notorious
strange request: “That she should never trouble him—but never, never: neither
appeal nor complain nor write about anything; only meet all questions herself,
receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing over and let him
alone.” We will see how this is a choice that both upholds Victorian gender roles
but also jeopardizes them by giving women freedoms they wouldn’t have
elsewhere, we will see how the governess’s gendered identity will become more
complicated as the story progresses, less markedly normative, while she
navigates Bly which is separated from the rest of society, and also renders Bly a
somehow queer space. The same thing will happen to her sexual identity.
Miles’s uncle has decided to send Miles away from this all female space that
characterized the life of pre pubescent boys in the Victorian era[4] to send him
into a new space, the all male space of the boarding school, even if it is
recognized he is a bit young for it: “She would also have, in holidays, to look
after the small boy, who had been for a term at school—young as he was to be
sent, but what else could be done?”, as the novel shows, and as we will see in
detail later, the boarding school was also a deeply pederastic space, and
pederasty was tolerated in it often even when it was physically expressed, with
the condition that it wasn’t expressed via actual sodomy (anal penetration). But
apparently something went wrong in Miles’s case.
Flora’s education is on the contrary considered less important, and so is her
socialization - as we’ve seen from the governess’s describing herself and being
described as a “girl”; there isn’t a marked contrast between women and girls,
while there is one between men and boys, and as “The Romance Of The
Nursery” says: “Growing up, for the boys of Peter Pan, The Turn Of The Screw,
and Tim…entails not becoming an adult, but becoming a man”[5] (Even, it could
be argued, literally becoming a male). We will se what this meant in the boarding
school.
On the contrary, Miles’s and Flora’s behaviors and physical looks are almost
identical, and they are constantly compared to each other. Interestingly when the
governess and the children themselves want to scrutinize the sameness between
them, they also invoke age. “Inferior…age”, the governess says, just a line
before reconfirming their sameness, or “Are you comparing me to a baby girl?”,
says Miles. Boys and girls in the Victorian era and indeed today were and are
considered very similar when it comes to things that matter[6], while of course
the same does not apply for men and women[7]. The lack of difference in
Victorian thought about boys and girls is also talked about in Kincaid’s “Child-
Loving”[8]. In the Victorian Era children were dressed the same until they were
seven[9], and after that age boys’s clothings was still markedly different than that
of men. The latter is still true for boys’s clothing today. Miles’s rebellion to the
governess and her remembrance of his future role is associated with him wearing
adult clothes and talking like an adult - factors that are presented to us as quite
unnatural in a child. So, features that affected boys’s and girls’s future as adults
like schooling were very gendered (The older governess, Mrs .Grose, can’t read,
which can be attributed yes to her class, but also to her gender) we will see later
as well how much Miles values the education and socialization of the boarding
school (and also the possibility of having sexual experiences, particularly
pederastic sexual experiences, it affords him, or at least used to afford him),
while features that had no bearing on their future and most importantly were
supposed to be left behind as they aged were not (Or were they, since they
contrasted the femininity of women and children with the masculinity of adult
men?).
Then there are the ghosts - Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. Many analysis
recognized the fact that the association between Quint and the tower, and that
between Miss Jessel and the lake are symbolisms for the male and female genital
organ[10]. Quint is represented using adjectives like “very erect” and “tall, active
and erect”. But let’s analyze the entirety the first meeting between Quint and the
governess. She mistakes him at first for the supposed object of her sexual desire
(I contest that the governess has ever desired the uncle in the next section), but
soon realizes her mistake: “There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of
which, after these years, there is no living view that I can hope to give”, and
immediately conceptualizes Quint as a sexual threat: “An unknown man in a
lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred”, this
line says much about how the fear of rape is part of women’s everyday
experiences, both in the Victorian era and ours. Only in different ways. The idea
is that a woman who is “impure” (Who has not been “privately bred”) does not
have that fear, because she cannot fear corruption, having been already
corrupted. She cannot fear the loss of “honor” and “respectability” because she
is already dishonored. This shapes the governess’s understanding of child
molestation as well, as we will see later, in the Victorian era children who were
victims of sexual offenses were by no means seen as innocent in all cases, even
while the cult of “The Innocent Child” was a focal point of Victorian views on
childhood. In fact, while she starts with the idea that Miles and Flora are the
most innocent children in the world, she will start changing her mind, at the
beginning she thought she had to rescue the children from the ghosts, but at a
certain point of the story she will start to believe that she needs to rescue the
children from their own perverse selves, we will analyze that in greater depth
later. She also observes that: “So I saw him as I see the letters I form on this
page; then, exactly, after a minute, as if to add to the spectacle, he slowly
changed his place—passed, looking at me hard all the while, to the opposite
corner of the platform. Yes, I had the sharpest sense that during this transit he
never took his eyes from me.” Her initial mistaking of Quint for the uncle,
portrays them as two sides of the same coin. While the uncle represents the
hegemonic masculinity of the wealthy young man of “charming ways with
women”, we will see how Quint on the contrary embodies the deviant
masculinity of the Victorian “sex offender”, even if he constantly oscillates
between a normative and non-normative role. On her second encounter with
Quint, she writes: “He remained but a few seconds—long enough to convince me
he also saw and recognised; but it was as if I had been looking at him for years
and had known him always. Something, however, happened this time that had
not happened before; his stare into my face, through the glass and across the
room, was as deep and hard as then, but it quitted me for a moment during
which I could still watch it, see it fix successively several other things. On the
spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he
had come there. He had come for someone else.” Her observation that “it was as
if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always”, but her later
realization that “It was not for me he had come there. He had come for someone
else”, seems to situate Quint into the archetype of the Victorian Pedophile (The
“pedophile” was invented in fact in the Victorian era, the concept of “pedophilia
erotica” did not exist before), who traumatizes generations of children. But now
that she is not a child anymore, she knows he came here for “someone else”.
And that inspires her to protect the children: “The flash of this knowledge—for it
was knowledge in the midst of dread—produced in me the most extraordinary
effect, started, as I stood there, a sudden vibration of duty and courage.”, but we
will soon find out, and it will be explored in greater detail later, that her
intentions aren’t as noble, it is here that she says finally: “It was confusedly
present to me that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied
my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room”, she actually
does so, considering the way that she gazes upon the beauty of the children,
“eroticizes in the manner of a male pedophile”, according to yet another scholar
of The Turn[11]. This is where the governess’s gendered identity starts being
more complicated. After the second apparition of Quint, the governess decides to
confide in her colleague Mrs. Grose about what she has seen: “She thought a
minute. “Was he a gentleman?”
I found I had no need to think. “No.” She gazed in
deeper wonder. “No.”
“Then nobody about the place? Nobody from the
village?”
“Nobody—nobody. I didn’t tell you, but I made sure.” She breathed a vague
relief: this was, oddly, so much to
the good. It only went indeed a little way. “But if he isn’t a gentleman—”
“What is he? He’s a horror.” If he isn’t a gentleman, he has to be a horror, this is
the rationalization of the governess who knows only two models of masculinity.
But the “gentleman” (the uncle) and “the horror” (Quint) are not opposites, they
are parallels. Now that the governess has recognized him as a pedophile, Quint’s
role of sexual threat to “young women privately bred” has shifted (Even if we
will see it coming back, and I’ll talk about it) towards a different role: That of
sexual threat to children: “Oh, I’m not fit for church!”
“Won’t it do you good?”
“It won’t do them—!” I nodded at the house.
“The children?”
“I can’t leave them now.”
“You’re afraid—?”
I spoke boldly. “I’m afraid of him.” but that casts her in a masculinized role, that
of the “protector”, protecting children from Quint The Voyeur: “I laughed. “I
had no opportunity to ask him! This evening, you see,” I pursued, “he has not
been able to get in.”
“He only peeps?”
“I hope it will be confined to that!”, not just a defenseless “young woman
privately bred”. In fact, today as well we describe how adults are “haunted” by
sexual abuse.
Quint even looks like a deviant: “He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a
pale face, long in shape, with straight, good features and little, rather queer
whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are, somehow, darker; they
look particularly arched and as if they might move a good deal. His eyes are
sharp, strange—awfully; but I only know clearly that they’re rather small and
very fixed. His mouth’s wide, and his lips are thin, and except for his little
whiskers he’s quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an
actor.” Red hair, “very red” is perhaps the most startling trait of Quint,
considering red haired males were though to be satanic. Then the governess tells
Grose that: “I’ve never seen one, but so I suppose them. He’s tall, active, erect,”
I continued, “but never—no, never!—a gentleman.”, tall, active, erect
ungentlemanly men can only be one thing: Rapists. Quint departs from the
traditional pedophile in the description of his masculinity and later in the
description of his relationship with Miss Jessel (that will be analyzed), the
construction of the pedophile, for example in Kraftt-Ebing, was that of a weak
and impotent man with a pathological attraction to prepubescents, who cannot
establish meaningful relationships with adult females because of his weaknesses,
and in a way is trying to reassert himself[12]. We still somehow view pedophiles
this way. That they “cannot control women” is a phrase that is often heard about
pedophiles even today, the belief meaning that a “normal” man can. Kevin Ohi
quotes this modern study about pedophiles in “Innocence And Rapture”:
“Paedophiles were variously discovered to be timid, isolated, dependent,
submissive, effemminate, sexually inhibited, and generally not adequate to the
task of competition with other men for heterosexual adult conquests…
Paedophilia would seem to be one of several alternative adaptations to the
problem of lack of success (or perceived inability to succeed) in intermale
competition for access to females. It has often been noted by ethnologists that the
males of any species are thrown into strong Darwinian competition with one
another. Those that are most successful monopolize an unequal share of female
resources, and the others have to make to do with various substitute sexual
outlets”, “It is as if, having rejected women as sex targets for some reason, the
arousal mechanism seizes on the next best available approximation to women,
which may well be thirteen-year-old boys”[13], as Kevin Ohi rightly observes:
“Such a passage never stops to ask why any woman would ever find such men
sexually attractive (to say nothing of why thirteen-year-old boys are “the next
best available approximation to women”) nor why refusing “intermale
competition” is bad, why relating to adult women as something other than
“female resources” or “sexual outlets” is necessarily pathological”[14]. For
example Quint is described as handsome by the governess and Mrs.Grose: “She
visibly tried to hold herself. “But he is handsome?” I saw the way to help her.
“Remarkably!”, so much that many scholars assert that the governess had a
sexual attraction towards him. The parallel between him and the uncle is even
more evident when she notes they are wearing the same clothes:“And dressed
—?”
“In somebody’s clothes. “They’re smart, but they’re not his own.”she broke into
a breathless affirmative groan: “They’re the master’s!”. At this point in the
book, the governess still did not know who Quint was or even that he was dead,
but she is about to be informed by Mrs.Grose, who gives an interesting
description of his time there:“He never wore his hat, but he did wear—well,
there were waistcoats missed! They were both here—last year. Then the master
went, and Quint was alone.” “I followed, but halting a little. “Alone?” “Alone
with us.” Then, as from a deeper depth, “In charge,” she added.”, Mrs.Grose
lumps herself with the children “Alone with us” in the danger she was exposed
to by Quint’s presence, and reveals that when he was alive he was in charge of
the house, a task that was given to him by the uncle, who probably began to
worry about the excessive freedom of women and children in the house of Bly,
of course it’s his gendered identity as a man that afforded him the role of head of
the house while he was alive. He probably was given also the task of being a
“male role model” and “mentor” for Miles, also a concept that is very much tied
with pederasty, older authors in fact remarked, quite misogynistically like most
discourses related to “mentors”: “Here is a pubescent (sic) boy, unhappy in all-
female company, fatherless, asking for the help of his only male relation who
fails him”[15], justifying his attachment to Quint by pointing to the fact that he is
fatherless, and that his uncle does not care about him. Ellis Hanson in “Screwing
With Children In Henry James”, analysis particularly of the 1961 movie
adaptation, who had lines like: “The poor little boy worshipped Quint”, “You
can’t blame the child, a lonely boy with no father”, the poem he recites, “What
shall I sing to my lord from my window”, is also charged with eroticized
meanings[16], remarks that the approach is willfully desexualizing: “Miles’s
sexual desire for a man is made to disappear into his need for a parent”[17]; but
I would argue that the approach is simply unconsciously eroticizing all father-
son relationships, by promoting the interchangeability of a father with a lover.
This is a trend that we see in modern child sexual abuse cases as well. In a 2020
Washington Post article where men recounted their experiences of child sexual
abuse in the Boy Scouts of America (In organizations geared towards the
socialization of boys and who place great importance on “male role models”
pederasty tends to be very much widespread, Baden-Powell himself was
attracted to boys. There was much sexual coercion, but even when those
relationships were consensual, our way of looking at sexual contact between
men and children still considers them “abusive”) one of them remarked: “I was
a target. I had to be. Here was a kid, with no father, probably looking for any
kind of attention he could get from a man”[18]. These discourses almost sound
like a justification on why a child has allowed a man to seduce them, one with a
good relationship with their father presumably has nothing to say in their
defense, and more specifically they are a gendered threat to men to intimate
them to remain part of boys’s lives, because boys who do not have men in their
lives are bound to end up in destruction and deviance, even falling prey to
pedophiles because of how great the need to have an adult male presence in their
lives is (A quite pedophilic idea, actually), they also represent anxieties over a
“matriarchal” family. In modern CSA cases we will try to prove the child’s
innocence as much as possible, in contrast with the Victorian Era, when the
innocence of the children involved in these relationships was even more feeble,
but at the very end, if today we recognize an aberration of childhood, the non-
innocent child, we do not only end up justifying sexual contact with them, but
also sexual violence. This is why very often we see people wishing rape on
juvenile criminals who have been charged with violent, very much un-childish
crimes. Because today, when we discover a non-innocent child, we discover a
perverse adult, and adult who is an adult in everything but legally.
This will be analyzed even further later.
The governess is now totally convinced that Quint is a pedophile: “He was
looking for someone else, you say—someone who was not you?” “He was
looking for little Miles.” A portentous clearness now possessed me. “That’s
whom he was looking for.” “But how do you know?” “I know, I know, I know!”
My exaltation grew. “And you know, my dear!”, and even takes for granted that
Mrs.Grose also knows. But there are two children, and yet she is sure that it is
Miles that Quint is looking for, even before Grose informs her in a famous
passage that Quint was “too free” with Miles. The governess has a moral panic
on sexual relations between Quint and Miles, reacting to the knowledge of
Quint’s “freedoms” with her boy like this: “This gave me, straight from my
vision of his face—such a face!—a sudden sickness of disgust”, imagining sexual
intercourse between that “base menial” and the beautiful innocent child she
believes Miles is disgusts her, but in her desire to know what happened between
the two, she also betrays a sexual interest in it.
Going back to the issue of her knowing it was Miles before Mrs.Grose told her,
then we have on the contrary the description of what went on between Quint and
Miss Jessel that I am about to examine. Basing ourself on the fact that Quint is
represented as being sexually predatory towards women and boys in particular,
he reminds us of the pattern described by Randolph Trumbach in his studies. But
the paradigm, according to Trumbach’s studies, shifted in 1700. He says: “The
older pattern could still be found in the 1720s. But after that, it was only males
in special environments, such as ships at seas, prisons or colleges.”[19] The
libertine described by Trumbach also tended to be an higher class man[20]. Quint,
by being constructed as being attracted to Jessel and Miles, rather than Miles and
Flora, is not much the medical construction of the pedophile, considering the
role he was also probably appointed to as the “mentor” of Miles, he resembles
much more the classical pederast, rather than the modern pedophile. Men that
recognized themselves in the pederastic tradition in the Victorian Era generally
attributed to themselves notions of masculinity and stability, like the author
Norman Douglas[21] (But again, he was an higher class man, we will go back to
that), who was also perceived by others that way, but who recognized the hostile
environment of late nineteenth century Britain and in fact spent much of his life
in places like Italy, were pederasty was much more tolerated[22], men that
recognized themselves in the pathologized pedophile of sexologists and
psychiatrists did not, and were not perceived as such. Then what to make of the
governess idea that it seemed to her as she knew him always, and her
construction of him as a pedophile? Could the imagined pedophilic intercourse
between her as a child and Quint possibly be a sexual fantasy? The governess
also contradicts herself on something else, while most of the time departing from
normative gender roles to cast herself first as a protector of the children, and
then as a more literal rival of Quint for the (sexual?) possession of Miles (Which
in a way also helps to explain why the central ghost targets Miles, because
despite the fact that the governess eroticizes both children, she is more attracted
to Miles, it makes sense if we agree with the theory that situates Quint and Jessel
as expressions of the governess’s desire for the children) , the most masculinized
role she assumes throughout the novel, which will be more discussed when I will
go over the ambiguities of her sexuality, she also goes back to the more
traditional role of the woman in danger that she embodied when she first saw
Quint on the tower, first observing that: “I was there to protect and defend the
little creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most loveable, the appeal
of whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant
ache of one’s own committed heart”, but then correcting herself and noting: “We
were cut off, really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing
but me, and I—well, I had them”, equalizing herself, like Mrs.Grose, with the
children.
Women in the Victorian era, and in some contexts, women today as well were
assimilated to children, women under a patriarchy are always understood as
some sort of adult child: The ideal Victorian woman looked like a child, needed
the same protection as a child and was supposed to be sexually ignorant like a
child, she uses the words “innocence” and “purity” throughout the novel not just
to talk about Miles and Flora, but herself as well.
But what about non-innocent women? They were conceived very similarly to
how non-innocent children were, as we’ve seen and we’ll see further later.
Think of Miss Jessel’s character and the gendered differences between her role
and Quint’s.
She was “infamous”: “Oh, handsome—very, very,” I insisted; “wonderfully
handsome. But infamous.” She slowly came back to me. “Miss Jessel—was
infamous”, because she had a relationship with Quint despite being a “lady”
(And possibly got pregnant, that being the “dreadful” reason they suspect she
went away for):“I must have it now. Of what did she die? Come, there was
something between them.” “There was everything.” “In spite of the difference
—?” “Oh, of their rank, their condition”—she brought it woefully out. “She was
a lady.” I turned it over; I again saw. “Yes—she was a lady.”, her infamity is
defined in terms of sexual passiveness: She “allowed” Quint to do as he wished
(Interestingly Miles’s relationship with Quint is defined in similar terms, both by
the novel and by other scholars: “I think also the unwillingness to confront that
Miles…maybe allowed Quint to indulge in sex with him comes out of the
unwillingness even to discuss pederasty”[23]), while as we’ve seen Quint’s
infamity is defined in terms of sexual activity: “our employer’s late clever, good-
looking “own” man; impudent, assured, spoiled, depraved. “The fellow was a
hound.” Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense of
shades. “I’ve never seen one like him. He did what he wished.” “With her?”
“With them all.”, “with them all”, Quint subjugated, according to Mrs.Grose,
“did what he wished”(Despite the admission that “it must have been also what
she wished”) not only with Miss Jessel but also with the children - or if we
consider the fact that Quint was only interested in Miles, so much so that Miss
Jessel only took care of Flora, despite her having been hired to teach Miles as
well, and that “the little lady doesn’t remember”, with him, Jessel, and other
female employees. In this case, pedophilia and particularly pederasty is
considered a sign of hypermasculinity, as Kevin Ohi points out in reference to
the passage quoted before, “At some other moments, pedophilia is an
exaggerated form of heterosexuality - promoting thirteen year old boys from
substitutes to super-women (“more” female than any woman could be) who are
therefore the logical objects of hyperbolic heterosexuality”[24], this also reflected
some other discourses on pedophilia in the Victorian era, like Havelock Ellis’s
who considered a preference for “androgynous youths” as more normal even
than pedophilia directed towards “unripe girls”[25] (Defined as prepubescent, so
before they can menstruate, as sexual contact between very young pubertal girls
and men was commonplace in Victorian England), because “they more closely
resembled women”, but also pointed out to the exclusion of adult (female)
sexual partners in favor of a “better alternative” while this is not what Quint was
supposed to have done in the book (He was in the opera, we will see that), but
rather the model of sexuality that you could find in the already discussed pre-
1700 libertine. Or a greek pederast, if the way he was described was more
positive, considering the emphasis certain scholars as I mentioned put on his
“mentoring” (an inherently patriarchal idea) of Miles.
Considering the gendered differences between Quint and Jessel’s “infamity”,
how does that impact their respective hauntings of the children?
First of all, when Miss Jessel was in life and “was only for the little lady”, Flora
received no warnings about the time spent with her. Yes, it is true that this is
what she was hired for, but the hints point out that being a role model for Miles
was also what Quint was hired for by the uncle: “He was terribly short with
anything of that kind, and if people were all right to him—” “He wouldn’t be
bothered with more?”” “On innocent little precious lives. They were in your
charge.” “No, they were not in mine!” she roundly and distressfully returned.
“The master believed in him”.the country air so good for him. “So he had
everything to say. Yes”—she let me have it—“even about them.” “Them—that
creature?” I had to smother a kind of howl. “And you could bear it!” “No. I
couldn’t—and I can’t now!” And the poor woman burst into tears.” Miles and
Quint spending time together was a problem because he “was admittedly bad”,
thing the “master didn’t know” when he appointed him as a probable mentor for
Miles. Which could also point to the reversed direction that the contact which
Mrs. Grose observed between Quint and Miles gave her reasons to believe that
Quint was bad, or at least confirmed her suspicions. Anyways, Miles received
warnings such as: “I pressed again, of course, at this. “You reminded him that
Quint was only a base menial?” that were supposed to construe Quint as a
sexual threat to him, Flora did not receive them about Miss Jessel. Jessel on the
contrary wasn’t thought to be a threat to the children so much that she was the
one who was first asked to warn Miles about spending too much time with
Quint, thing she refused to do “most strangely”, even telling Mrs.Grose to “mind
her business”. Miss Jessel here is situated as the “female co offender” in modern
CSA cases, a woman who is completely subjugated to the will of her male
partner, who is often also in an abusive relationship and who aids him in his
sexual offending against children, participating in them, instructing the children
on what to do, procuring images of children or even the children themselves to
her partner and so on[26]. It’s said that Miss Jessel “didn’t mind” and never
“forbid him”, meaning she did not forbid Miles and Quint’s “improper”
relationship. That Flora received no warnings about her relationship with Jessel,
while Miles’s relationship with Quint was a moral panic to Mrs.Grose also
reflects the time’s and our modern views of pedophilia. The Female Pedophile is
often fetishized or masculinized but the vast majority of the time, both today and
even more so in the Victorian era, thought to be non existent, a woman that has
sex with children goes against all of our assumptions about women’s “essential”
drives to be motherly and loving nurturers of children, and also on our
assumptions that women’s sexuality centers on being dominated by men, not on
seeking relationships where they can have power over another. Of course men’s
sexuality is seen in terms of penetration and activity as we’ve seen, while
women, who do not have phalluses, can’t be threatening. Of course, because of
socialization, not of nature, female pedophiles are actually an almost minuscule
minority, and an often fetishized one - The female teacher who has sex with a
boy, the mother who commits incest with her daughter, they are all quite
common male fantasies (And a way for men to exorcise their own pedophilic
desires by pretending that the main attraction of the fantasy is the adult woman),
and when they’re not, as I said, they are masculinized, female pedophiles that are
not conventionally attractive (do not fit in our culture’s standards of how women
should look like) in the media are often referred to in terms largely associated
with male predators (“predator”, “ogre” ect), and are often fat, black, short-
haired, sometimes blatantly queer-coded. This is why Miss Jessel’s relationship
with Flora is not a problem for Mrs. Grose, Miss Jessel is described as a
conventionally attractive young woman who was rendered infamous only by her
relationship with Quint, there was nothing according to Mrs. Grose to suspect
about her being “only for the little lady”, this patriarchal view of sexual relations
is also what allows the governess such a close intimacy with her charges,
intimacy that includes almost romantic aspects, like the way she “smothers them
with kisses”, if the governess was male, there would be no doubts of the sexual
intimacy between for example her and Miles, considering the fact that the
relationship between tutor and pupil in another Henry James’s novel, “The
Pupil”, is understood by almost every critic to be pederastic in nature[27], despite
Morgan and Pemberton’s intimacy being actually less than the intimacy between
the governess and the children in “The Turn Of The Screw”, where the
governess’s pedophilia is still debated. Despite this being caused by patriarchal
assumptions on the inherent passivity of female sexuality, media still blames
“misandry” for it. Misogynistic groups that call themselves “Men’s Rights
Activists” are obsessed with female predation on children, and also with men
who were mistaken for pedophiles and treated unfairly, claiming that panic about
pedophilia was not influenced by the political right and the erotophobia of a
conservative society, but by feminism. Far right social media personality,
conspiracy theorist and misogynist Mike Cernovich has an article on his website
called “Sex Hysteria is Killing Mentorship”[28], where he expresses the view that
Feminists construed a panic about pedophilia to prevent men from “mentoring
boys”, also invoking the “frightening data” (unsourced) that 26% of children “in
our society” are born to single mothers (Ironically, he is famous for promoting
conspiracy theories about pedophilia). Oh the horror! An article that caused great
controversy called “Deconstructing The Essential Father”[29], proved that the
real reason why children born to single mothers tend to have more problems than
children born in a “traditional family”, is also rooted in our patriarchal society -
Men are still the primary source of income in families and women tend to earn
considerably less than men. There are countless of newspaper articles where
“misandry” is invoked as the reason why men are more likely to suspected to be
child molesters, with titles like “Are We Teaching Our Kids To Be Fearful Of
Men?”[30], “Avoiding Kids: How Men Cope With Being Cast As Predators”[31],
“Eek! A Male!”[32], that always feature the same stereotypes, the innocent family
man who has been mistaken for a pedophile for hanging around with his
child(ren), and the poor fatherless boy who has been “denied a mentor” because
of our society’s “hatred of men”, indeed such cases do happen, like the man who
“was treated like a child molester” for sitting next to a boy on an airplane[33], or
the writer who was “branded a pedophile” for hiking with his eleven year old
son[34]. But the cause behind such facts happening as well can be traced back to
the patriarchy.
Also, there are moral panics about children’s contacts with women, as the panic
about “the single mother” shows.
Even if they are not about direct sexual contact between the woman and the
child, they are about the child imitating the so called “infamous” woman.
This is exactly how I interpret the governess’s view of Miss Jessel’s haunting of
Flora.
So many aspects of Jessel’s haunting of the girl reflect moral panics about
women that are “bad” female role models and “sexualize” girls. The whole panic
about the “sexualization of girls” is explicitly patriarchal, not only because of the
extreme policing of girls’s behavior, but also because it is a tool to control adult
women as well. “What messages is she sending to young girls by behaving like
that?” is something that is very frequently said when a woman freely expresses
her sexuality. The idea of precocity, that explicitly concerns so called sexualized
girls, that our culture sees as “becoming women too fast”, of course sexualized
boys are not “becoming men too fast”, as we can see from the fact that Jessel
turns Flora into a woman but Quint does not turn Miles into a man, quite the
opposite actually, they are also conceived as assuming the traits of a female
adult, and a decidedly “infamous” one at that. As Foucault said, “precocious
girls and ambiguous schoolboys”[35]. Sexualized children who are “precociously
men” do not exists in our cultural economy, even if the governess and us fixate
on the perversity of Miles’s “adult talk” in the last chapters, actually, the encoded
sexualized meanings in those conversations point to quite the opposite direction,
and they weren’t directly engendered by Quint, also, Miles’s behavior,
particularly in the book, points more to the “polymorphously perverse” child
rather than to any fixed adult identity, which departs from the traditional
approach of the “sexualized child” that is imitating adult (most often female, as I
said) behavior also because Quint is not seen only as a “sexualizing” influence,
but as downright sexually predatory, because of the gender differences I just
pointed out). When Britney Spears was at the beginning of her career, Scottish
conservative activists published articles with lines such as: “Some of the 101,
500 teenage pregnancies which happen each year have been initiated by the likes
of Ms Spears”[36]; implying that the expression of the singer’s sexuality could be
even more than just an “influence”, but downright “get girls pregnant”. In 2020,
you can see it with the (misogynistic) moral panic about the rap song “WAP”[37].
The governess remarks that when Flora is with Miss Jessel, she is not even a
child anymore: “Our not seeing it is the strongest of proofs. She has used it to go
over, and then has managed to hide it.” “All alone—that child?” “She’s not
alone, and at such times she’s not a child: she’s an old, old woman.” Miss Jessel,
with her sexual immorality, with her “infamousness”, turns little girls into
experienced women. This was generally the theory that was used to describe
Miles’s and Quint’s relationship in older times, when certain topics were taboo
(Even if the possibility of a sexual relationship between Miles and Quint was
considered as early as the date of publication of the novel, with Myers affirming
that Miles feels “pederastic passion” for the ghost of Peter Quint[38]), but critics
now largely agree that in Miles and Quint’s case, the book hints to a sexual
relationship/sexual abuse[39]. When Flora tells the governess she does not see
anything and offends her, she describes the girl as such: “Then, after this
deliverance, which might have been that of a vulgarly pert little girl in the street,
she hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and buried in her skirts the dreadful little
face”, that description, in the Victorian era could have easily been used to
describe a child prostitute. But, the governess, by pointing out with this
eroticized description what Miss Jessel has made Flora “become”, needs to
confront also her own problems as related to gender and sexuality. This is not the
first time that the governess fixates her erotic gaze on Flora, she describes her in
a passage for example as: “She stood there in so much of her candour and so
little of her nightgown, with her pink bare feet and the golden glow of her curls.”
Sexual identity in The Turn will be the focus of our next section.

Sexual Identity In “The Turn Of The Screw” (1898).

Sexual identity also has not been ignored in The Turn, but, like gender, some of
the aspects I’ll explore in this section have been. Issues like the governess’s
queerness and where to situate Quint’s implied attraction to boys or Miles’s
attraction to men have been unfairly ignored by scholars. I’ll explore them here.

In the period when James’s book was written, sexual categories like the
homosexual and the pedophile started to form, Foucault famously situates the
“birth” of the homosexual around the 70s of the nineteenth century, even if we
see some historical precedents where men who were attracted to other men were
seen as a special category of men. Similarly, the concept of “paedophilia erotica”
was created, and men attracted by prepubescent children also started to be
thought of as a separate species. Lesbianism still remained more hidden, but talk
of “sexually inverted women” also began to be popularized among sexologists.
The sexuality of the child has been also gave its space in sexology, particularly
by Freudians, who despite that still didn’t wholly acknowledge said sexuality,
considering sexuality in older children was still thought of to be “latent”, in fact
it is the infant under five years old who is “polymorphously perverse”[40].
Despite that, sexologists still saw the sexuality of the child and the adolescent as
much less defined than that of adults, with interesting correlates with the idea of
homosexuality being “arrested development”[41].

Most scholars of “The Turn Of The Screw” used to consider the governess as
vigorously heterosexual, only later studies that analyzed her implied pedophilia
began to appear, and even more later studies that analyzed her queerness did,
those are still relatively few.
After all, one of the most important aspects of her character is that she accepted
in the first place to come to Bly because of her attraction to the uncle of the
children, in my analysis, I believe that the actual reason why she accepts to come
to Bly is the opposite. The text tells us: “There were others,” he went on, “who
hadn’t succumbed. He told her frankly all his difficulty—that for several
applicants the conditions had been prohibitive. They were, somehow, simply
afraid. It sounded dull—it sounded strange; and all the more so because of his
main condition.” “Which was—?” “That she should never trouble him—but
never, never: neither appeal nor complain nor write about anything; only meet
all questions herself, receive all moneys from his solicitor, take the whole thing
over and let him alone.” So, the governess is one of the very first women to
accept the uncle’s conditions, most of the other women, who are also described
as being attracted to the uncle, did not, and for a good reason: “But was that all
her reward?” one of the ladies asked. “She never saw him again.”. The
governess’s acceptance of the condition that not only they will never see each
other again, but also that she must never write to him, and her never seeming
troubled by the uncle’s condition, her refusal, up to the very end to ever write to
him even when Mrs. Grose urges her to, all fits into a paradigm of compulsory
heterosexuality. The term first appeared in an Adrienne Rich’s study called
“Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”[42], which articulated the
impossibility of women in an heteropatriarchal society to exclude men from their
existence, which fits the governess’s situation quite well. Despite the term being
originally employed to describe the condition of homosexual women in a
patriarchal society, many male homosexuals as well, particularly in the Victorian
Era, developed passions for unattainable or absent women like the governess
does, this is quite well studied. Some scholars argue that the governess is also
implied to be attracted to Quint, but Quint, being a ghost, is no less unattainable
than the uncle is, if nothing, he is more so. On the contrary, when she comes to
Bly she immediately develops a passion, which is quite sexualized, for the
children. Her pedophilia is of course gynephilic, her desire for prepubescent
children manifests itself in a desire for the feminine traits they embody.
Androphilic pedophilia is in fact almost literally non existent, which of course
means that for a woman to be a pedophile is a deviation from how most
women’s sexual attractions are conceptualized in a patriarchal society. She wants
a shy groom for her shy bride, shyness being a normatively feminine trait, not a
manly one that’s sure of himself, like the uncle would be. This is why as I
previously noted, women who are not conventionally sexually attractive to men
who commit pedophilic offenses are always portrayed as queer coded in the
media. From the very first moment the governess sees the children, she is
instantly attracted to them, and describes their looks in the same way a man that
sexually desires children would. We also know that their beauty has an effect on
her. This passage is striking: “She was the most beautiful child I had ever seen,
and I afterwards wondered that my employer had not told me more of her. I slept
little that night—I was too much excited.” She of course represses her attraction,
disguising it as maternal feelings, as we’ve seen, women are allowed much
greater intimacy with children as compared to men, but when she’ll wager a
fight against the pedophilic ghosts, her own pedophilic impulses will become too
strong to repress. Her fight with Quint for the possession of Miles as I said is the
best example for that, but as we’ve seen it is a behavior that goes explicitly
against female gender norms, of the Victorian Era and of our times, at the end of
the novel there is no more pretense of her opposing the sexual corruption of
children, her flirtation with Miles in particular has become too evident. There is
jealousy in the way she behaves - As we said she possibly wants to hear about
the sexual contact between Miles and Quint, she finds it titillating, but she is also
frustrated by the fact that Miles’s did not seem to have resisted Quint, while he
seems to be doing so with her, his flirtation seeming to not be really genuine,
and a way to get something from the governess. Miles understands that she
desires him, and uses that against her. He actually requests her to be left alone,
multiple times. He is annoyed by her overly affectionate behavior, but tolerates
it, as this line makes clear: "I threw myself upon him and in the tenderness of my
pity I embraced him. “Dear little Miles, dear little Miles—!” My face was close
to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it with indulgent good humour.
“Well, old lady?””. In fact this was also noted by a Nabokov scholar when he
remarked: “Compare Lolita, for instance, to Miles, in The Turn Of The Screw,
who never complains about Peter Quint (although he does seem to raise his fist
against the governess)”[43], the governess and Quint are equalized again here,
and the governess is also understood to be pedophilic. There is a gendered
component in this difference, the impossibility of children to “raise their fists”
against a man as compared to a woman, which was noted also in a passage in
Oates’s “Accursed Inhabitants”[44], one of the most explicit relevant adaptations
on the subject of Miles’s relationship with Quint. At the end of the novel, the
struggle seems between two lovers for the possession of a body, not of a soul.
Especially when preceded by the previously noted flirtation. One of the final
passages is the most explicit in that respect: “They are in my ears still, his
supreme surrender of the name and his tribute to my devotion. “What does he
matter now, my own?—what will he ever matter? I have you,” I launched at the
beast, “but he has lost you for ever!” Then, for the demonstration of my work,
“There, there!” I said to Miles”, this trope is especially common in media in a
situation where there is a triangle of two men and a woman, while there the
triangle is between a pedophilic (in that setting, temporarily masculinized)
woman and man, and a child. There are other moments which hint in an even
more veiled way, to the governess’s queerness. Namely, her affectionate
behavior with Mrs.Grose: “She held me there a moment, then whisked up her
apron again with her detached hand. “Would you mind, Miss, if I used the
freedom—” “To kiss me? No!” I took the good creature in my arms and, after we
had embraced like sisters, felt still more fortified and indignant”, despite the
desexualization of their embrace by remarking its sisterly quality, the language
used, particularly the use of the word “freedom”, which will then be used to
denote the, as we’ve seen, sexualized relationship between Miles and Quint,
point to something more. There is also her attention to female beauty, not just
that of Flora (and to an extent, Miles’s - If we base ourselves on the way he is
described, as I previously noted), but also that of Miss Jessel:“In mourning—
rather poor, almost shabby. But—yes— with extraordinary beauty.” I now
recognised to what I had at last, stroke by stroke, brought the victim of my
confidence, for she quite visibly weighed this. “Oh, handsome—very, very,” I
insisted; “wonderfully handsome. But infamous.”, handsome is a word she
previously used to describe the uncle and Peter Quint. The uncle and Quint are
parallels as we’ve seen, but thanks to the governess’s veiled, but deviant, sexual
identity, Quint and her also become parallels. Then I’d concentrate myself on
Peter Quint’s sexual identity.
Peter Quint originally appeared in 1898, almost two centuries after the “shift” in
the understanding of sexual practices that Randolph Trumbach situates in 1700,
at least for Britain.
And yet, that does not mean that no traces of the former understanding of sexual
practices remained in the 19th century, or even today. More than just traces, I’d
say. Trumbach talks of a time where sexual relations between men and boys
were more or less normalized, and despite the laws against sodomy, rarely
punished, an example of a society where that paradigm was easily observable is
Renaissance Florence, as documented by Michael Rocke’s excellent study[45]. In
Renaissance England as well women and boys were almost totally equalized[46],
and the only prosecutions for sodomy that have reached us are for the most part
for cases where force or extreme youth (of the passive partner) were involved[47].
In the 19th century, it wasn’t like that anymore, but that does not mean that
men’s attraction to boys was necessarily understood in an homosexual paradigm.
At least for sexologists, for the most part, it wasn’t.
In the 19th century is also where the concept of pedophilia first originated, and
there was much more attention on the corruption of youth than ever before[48].
Attention on the phenomena of the extreme youth of a lot of London prostitutes
influenced the decision to raise the age of consent for girls to sixteen, this was
called the Labouchere Amendment, who also criminalized all sexual contacts
between males, not just those that involved anal penetration[49]. Before that law,
for the crime of sodomy to be valid, there had to be proven penetration of the
anus of the other party, there was also the crime of “attempted sodomy”, but it
was considered much less serious. In 1817, a man was sentenced to death for
penetrating a seven year old boy’s mouth with his penis, but he was acquitted on
appeal, because it technically did not constitute sodomy[50]. For boys, there was
no age of consent, but only an age of criminal responsibility which worked like
an age of consent, because it established that if a boy under the age of criminal
responsibility was involved in sodomy (It was taken for granted, always as the
passive partner, we have almost zero records historically of boys penetrating
men, a few of boys penetrating each other, but almost always the older one
penetrated the younger one), the only one charged with a crime would have been
the party over the age of criminal responsibility. The age of criminal
responsibility was low, even if higher than the age of consent for girls (Which
used to be as low as ten years old), which means that a lot of boys, even in
situations where consent was ambiguous, could be punished for being what
today we would call “sexual abuse victims”. Nevertheless, sodomy between a
man and a boy was still thought to be more natural and less heinous than sodomy
between two men[51] (Almost all the prosecutions for sodomy historically are
cases of pederasty, probably because age-undifferentiated homosexuality wasn’t
even really thought to exist). When, during the Victorian Era’s time of attention
for the very first time to the sexual abuse of children, the introduction of an age
of consent for boys was proposed, the idea was opposed by first wave Feminists
who didn’t have interest in decriminalizing sexual contact between males, or
didn’t even thought of the possibility of decriminalization, and justly referred to
the virtual non existence of child sexual abuse committed by women[52]. But the
idea that the man who is sexually attracted to boys is not acting homosexually
existed before Nicholas Groth’s studies[53] and after the previously mentioned
shift of paradigm, as we can see by the comments of sexologists like Havelock
Ellis, who wrote: “A sexual attraction to boys is no doubt, as Moll points out,
that form of inversion which comes nearer to normal sexuality, for the subject of
it usually approaches nearer to the average man in physical and mental
disposition. The reason of this is obvious: Boys resemble women, and therefore it
requires a less profound organic twist to become sexually attracted to them”,
also adding, “Anyone who has watched private theatricals in boys’s schools will
have observed how easy it is for boys to personate women successfully…
Whether with injury to their own or other people’s morals I do not know”[54].
Moll himself had remarked: “The child attracting the male adult because of its
resemblance to a woman”[55]; Krafft-Ebing went even further, making a
comment almost undistinguishable from what contemporary studies on the
sexual identity of pedophiles tell us: “Practically speaking, acts of immorality
committed on boys by men sexually inverted are of the greatest rarity”[56]. Freud
too, while talking about Ancient Greece commented: “It is clear that in Greece,
where the most masculine men were numbered among the inverts, what excited a
man’s love was not the masculine character of a boy, but his physical
resemblance to a woman as well as his feminine mental qualities - his shyness,
his modesty, his need for instruction and assistance. As soon as the boy became
a man, he ceased to be a sexual object for men and himself, perhaps, became a
lover of boys”[57]. What these observations have in common with each other is
also the belief that women and children are very similar, that we see in modern
studies as well like the one I previously quoted, where children were mentioned
as being “the closest approximation” to women. The Turn Of The Screw is in
itself either a confirmation or a subversion of this train of thought, the main
preoccupation of the book being innocence, which is a trait that is almost always
invoked in reference to women and children, and in fact almost all the characters
in the book are such. Definitely a man who corrupts boys cannot be an invert,
because as the word itself suggests, an invert is someone who embodies the
characteristics thought to be inherent in the opposite gender, while pedophilia
was thought to be an exclusively male perversion, with, as I said, female
pedophilia clearly being in clear contrast with female gender roles. So, as Funke
remarked in “We Cannot Be Greek Now”: “Thus, congenital inversion is strictly
set apart from a more generalized perversion of the male sexual instinct
expressed in the abuse of boys”[58]. Of course this fits Quint’s character very
well, who isn’t construed to be in any way sexually dangerous to men but only to
women and children. Miles’s sexual identity is also quite complex. As I said he
fits the paradigm of the polymorphously perverse child even if he is too old to
incarnate it according to psychoanalytic thought, and even if there is something
that points to a more defined “homosexual” orientation in his behavior, but
considering in the 19th century being a homosexual equalled to being an outcast
or a rebel and Miles’s is construed to be quite the opposite, very invested in his
upper class male socialization, I would disagree with that and say that even in
his sexual desire he fits the paradigm of the boy in need of a mentor, but with a
revolutionary twist, or the idea that also began to appear in the Victorian era that
it is normal for children and adolescents to have an “homosexual phase”,
something that we believe today as well and that isn’t so much different from
what Trumbach delineated for boys pre 1700. It’s the transgressive modalities,
and resistance to adult power, of Miles’s desire that render it somehow queer, a
site for rebellion to the most absolute norm, that of adult control over children,
defied in what was a fundamentally normative context. I think the reason why
the concept of a homosexual “phase” exists is because, as I previously noted,
they are associated with the feminine. In fact adult homosexuals were
understood also by a paradigm of “arrested development”[59]. Havelock Ellis
again: “The sexual instinct is comparatively undifferentiated in early life, then
we must regard the inversion of later life, if it persists, as largely due to arrested
development”[60], Max Dessoir also understood it this way: “An undifferentiated
sexual feeling is normal, on the average, during the first years of puberty - i.e.,
from 13 to 15 in boys”[61]. Dessoir also had remarked on men attracted to boys,
of course saying, similarly to the previously seen sexologists, that they are more
“normal” than men attracted to men, because boys presented: “The same luster,
the same softness of skin and forms, the same breath of innocence as did
maiden”[62].The comment on innocence also validates my previous comment.
We are given quite clear indications of Miles’s sexual activity with males, not
only by the hours he spent with Peter Quint or by the things he said to “those he
liked” at school, but also by the conversations with the governess about his
return to school. The governess seems to understand at least a bit a boy’s need
for male role models, but this passage in reference to Miles’s telling her that it is
strange for a boy to always be with a lady is quite charged with hidden
meanings: “The boy, to my deep discomposure, was immensely in the right, was
in a position to say to me: “Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of
this interruption of my studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you a life
that’s so unnatural for a boy.” What was so unnatural for the particular boy I
was concerned with was this sudden revelation of a consciousness and a plan. “
That it is against Miles’s nature to be “with a lady” seems to point to a defined
homosexual orientation that she is hinting at[63], but this is part of a section of
the book where Miles is definitely acting in at the very least suggestive manner
towards the governess, even if as I said it doesn’t seem to be genuine. But,
sexologist Iwan Bloch, later, in 1906, remarked: “There does not exist a
homosexuality limited to a particular period of life…As such, the love of Greek
boys for older men does not count as [genuine] homosexuality.”[64] Victorian
scholars also thought it to be normal that a boy might not be interested in sexual
contact with women and girls in childhood and young adolescence, but to
develop non-sexual but definitely subtly eroticized crushes on older males, that
the latter should not, under any circumstance, take advantage of or exploit, as
Peter Quint (and possibly “those he liked at school”, as we’ll see later) did.
Edward Carpenter explains this view quite well in his “Affection And
Education”[65], but despite that, those texts implicitly agreed that if a boy was
lured into sexual contact by a bad “mentor” who exploited his position, even if
he was receptive, that he wasn’t wicked it could still be proved, even if, as we
will see later, there were exceptions even when it came to these texts. And, in the
case of The Turn, as I said, sexual contact seemed to have happened. And the
governess wants to make sense of Miles’s role in it. And the governess does
know it is “against nature”: "To mark, for the house, the high state I cultivated I
decreed that my meals with the boy should be served, as we called it,
downstairs; so that I had been awaiting him in the ponderous pomp of the room
outside of the window of which I had had from Mrs. Grose, that first scared
Sunday, my flash of something it would scarce have done to call light. Here at
present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium
depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as
possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against
nature.” Definitely all of these references must not have escaped the Victorian
reader, and they are made all the more blatant thanks to the employment of
words like “unnatural” and “against nature”, especially because Oscar Wilde’s
extremely publicized trials happened only three years before the publication of
the story[66]. It is striking how much the final scene resembles a trial, and Miles
during it is defined in much more adult terms, as a “gentleman”, he literally
stops being a child during that scene, a tendency that still wasn’t developed in
the Victorian Era, perverse children were still children, but who might have an
explanation in this particular context and becomes a gentleman of the Oscar
Wilde sort (Oscar Wilde didn’t distance himself that much from the traditional
paradigms discussed above, but instead of just women and boys he also had a
definitely queer predilection for a young adult men, in fact it is his relationship
with Douglas [The name figuring in The Turn is also an allusion that might not
have escaped the Victorian reader] that brought him to court in the first place)
who is on trial for sodomitical relationships with working class men (Peter
Quint). The governess doesn’t care that progressive sexologists (even if not
always) justified Miles’s behavior and thought it “natural” for a boy, as most
people did not, the belief is that even if sadly he got lured into sexual contact and
was receptive, to her Miles is perverse and needs “saving”; there is no question
of that. And him being “perverse” also justifies an eroticized gaze on him and
his behavior, both past and present. It shouldn’t be ignored that she started
believing this later in the book, but the foot she started on is no different that
how people start investigating, obsessively, cases of pedophilia today. Miles on
the contrary sided with them by defining the company of men and older boys as
“what a boy wants”, a boy in general, not just himself: “You’re tired of Bly?”
“Oh, no, I like Bly.”
“Well, then—?”“Oh, you know what a boy wants!”I felt that I didn’t know so
well as Miles, and I took temporary refuge. “You want to go to your uncle?”
Again, at this, with his sweet ironic face, he made a movement on the pillow.
“Ah, you can’t get off with that!”
She had portrayed herself while sitting on his bed as someone curing the sick,
Miles’s “sickness” again being an allusion to his sexual contact with males. We
will go back to it. A lot of the disgraced gentlemen in these cases weren’t social
revolutionaries, which also fits Miles’s paradigm. This un-childlike view of
Miles as “sodomite”, opens complicated discourses of class and the concept of
childhood innocence (And other more modern discourses like that of victim
blaming, that I hinted at while discussing Jessel). Class is going to be the focus
of our next section.

Class In The Turn Of The Screw (1898).

Class too hasn’t been ignored when discussing The Turn Of The Screw, in fact
Marxist analyses of the text are quite frequent, and it is has been considered a
definitely important aspect of the work. But here I will rather focus my attention
on the associations in particular between class and sexual corruption, and other
issues that I’ve already presented.

The Turn Of The Screw was written in a time period where panic about the
sexual corruption of children at the hands of servants was widespread.
Considering situations like that of Miles and Flora, of children all by themselves
with the hired help left in charge of them were quite common for the upper
classes, those panics reflected greater cultural anxieties about the purity and
innocence of children but also about the moral characters of the lower classes. In
fact, Miles’s association with Quint is construed as dangerous, not just because
of its unusual closeness, but also, mainly because of their class difference,
Quint’s social standing also influencing his construction as a sexually dangerous
individual: “There had been matters in his life—strange passages and perils,
secret disorders, vices more than suspected—that would have accounted for a
good deal more”, in fact, their situation reflect a paradox that still exist in our
society and that I have hinted at, our fear of men interacting with children but
also our fear that boys not having “male role models” and “mentors” in their
lives will lead them to become rebellious, disobedient children and non-
normatively masculine adults. This is why there were during the Victorian Era
some precise standards about who was a “role model” and who “a sexual threat”.
Working class men and this especially in the case of America (Where Henry
James was actually born), as Estelle Freedman in her “Redefining Rape”[67] and
Nayan Shah in his “Between “Oriental Depravity””[68] hint at, non-white men
were not, by definition, “appropriate role models” for (white) upper class boys
like Miles. Despite that, the recognition, in the Victorian Era, of sexual contact
between men and boys and youthful male prostitution, always involved working
class boys, and the corruption of the working class by their betters, it is obvious
when looking at high profile cases like that of the Cleveland Street Scandal[69].
The script of pederasty in the Victorian Era always involved an upper class man
and a lower class boy. Almost all cases of male intergenerational sex that were
brought to court followed this script. This is also largely why the governess, in
the “trial” scene cannot help but imagine Miles as one of these disgraced
gentlemen. In fact, the question of blackmail was very important, and indeed
sometimes such cases did happen but most of the times it was an excuse used to
protect the more powerful men that were being accused. As Jackson showed, one
of the principal characteristic that was attributed to boys who brought men to
court for sodomy (when the children were blamed, as they often were), was that
they were financially scheming, as opposed to girls who were precocious
ie.precociously women, because of course sexual contacts between men were not
normative, boys could not be accused of precocity[70], which of course implied
becoming an adult “too soon” in this context, and women’s sexual passivity to
men is naturalized. Even if with the construction of homosexuality, the concept
of the “preocious invert”, as I noted, who was not simply an “ambiguous
schoolboy” began to appear, but again, those discourses were largely confined to
upper class children. Later, thanks to the previously mentioned scandal there
were also the first concerns about the prostitution of boys as opposed to only that
of girls, and ça va sans dire, that only served strengthen the upperclass
man/lower class boy paradigm. In fact, it is often repeated by scholars that the
first moral panics about pedophlia in the Victorian Era almost exclusively
centered girls, especially those about prostitution. But that might have not be as
clear cut as some scholars imply, definitely the interest for prostituted girls was
much greater and as some scholars said, it was due to a coalition between the
social purity movement and the child welfare movement[71], with great concern
to the idea of the fallen girl or woman, of course girls became women and no
man would have wanted to marry a fallen woman, even if prostitution was an
activity that she had exclusively practiced in her youth and that she left behind.
That is because of the greater continuity that I often mentioned between girls and
women as opposed to between boys and men. And also to the fact that sexuality
was and in many ways still is very phallocentric, which obviously translated in
the fact that a if a working class man prostituted himself in youth that did not
impact in anyway his possibility of finding a wife and in the fact that this
hypothetical wife would be most likely indifferent to it. But there is something
else that needs to be noted, like the fact that the Labouchére Amendment
automatically created the charge of gross indecency in addition to raising the age
of consent for girls, and that the Maiden Tribute itself mentioned “Boys of the
same age who pursue the same dreadful calling…”[72]. The same thing might be
said about the upperclass/lower class model. I believe that outside of legal
discourses, upperclass children were considered very much at risk. John
Addington Symonds, in his “A Problem In Modern Ethics”, were he also
differentiated from the homosexual man the “depraved debauchee who abuses
boys”[73], he remarks that “It is the common belief that boys under age are
specially liable to corruption”[74], here not only he remarks that in popular
circles boys were thought to be more at risk than girls, but also, he couldn’t
possibly be discussing a panic about working class children, definitely he
referred to the milieu that he frequented, it is proved by the fact that he refutes
the claim by pointing out to working class girls by referring to the “manners of
London at night”. As Yuill highlights in his thesis, “The concern that young male
bodies would be irrevocably damaged through contact with older males was a
consistent theme in 19th century British and European sources”[75], these
sources almost always refer to upperclass boys or more generally non-working
class boys, often represented as being corrupted by working class youths or men.
This proves that we cannot exclusively base ourselves on the legal discourse. In
fact, following court cases we see almost no upperclass boys that were seduced
by their servants, but Havelock Ellis’s “Sexual Inversion”, presents a lot of case
studies of adult “inverts” recounting their childhood, with quite a number of
them telling of sexual activity with servants as children[76]. In France, a very
important country for James, where there also there was a lot of panic about
interactions between children and servants[77], a case like that was recounted by
an Italian homosexual who sent Emile Zola a text known as “Confessions Of A
Born Invert”[78]. In 1896, in France as well, Raffalovich published a three
hundred pages study about homosexuality called “Uranisme et Unisexualité”,
which contains several pages entirely devoted to the sexual desires of upper class
boys towards adult male domestic help. The chapter “Puberté des Uranistes”
presents a description of an hypothetical upper class boy seducing an adult male
servant, the way he presents this situation makes it sound like his belief was that
cases like these were by no means rare, even somehow “typical”.[79] It is striking
how much Miles and Quint fit into the context he delineated. But what departs
from this line of thought, complicates the issue and stands out to a modern
reader, is that these texts present to us children that are highly sexual and even
predatory, quite the opposite of helpless victims. In Ellis’s text a boy who used
his “childish, caressing manners a good deal behind his own age”[80], to take
some “liberties” with the farm-laborers portrays himself as somehow naughty
and even deceitful, while the men are portrayed in a similar way to how children
who allow a man who is suspected to have pedophilic inclinations a lot of
physical touching are: As gullible and innocent. Raffalovich’s text portrays the
working class man (who is construed here as by no means an invert himself,
quite the opposite actually) who cedes to the advances of a persistent “jeune
monsieur”, as a victim that was coerced by a socially more powerful person.
Somehow, the pre-1700 belief that all men are attracted to boys persists in
Raffalovich’s text, when it implies that it is natural for a man, particularly a
working class man (construed as baser and more animalistic) to not resist a boy’s
sexual advances, and not just in this instance. The greater awareness of injustices
perpetrated on the lower classes in the Victorian Era even outside England also
influences the text, which notes trough that example that if the depraved upper
classes can seduce working class children, perverted upper class children can
also corrupt righteous working class men. That might actually be the most fitting
description of Quint’s sexuality, which is the one Oates employs in her short
story[81], but because the paradigm had in fact shifted, those ideas co existed
with opposing or at least differing ones, as I noted. These examples of texts may
actually reflect a wider, hidden and ignored social pattern of adult male servants
having sexual contact with boys, and the patterns of how this sort of sexual
contact was conceived. It’s not a coincidence that the texts are all about
homosexuality, despite the texts themselves insisting in the fluid and undefined
character of childhood and adolescence sexuality. Today as well in fact, adult
homosexual men are much more likely to recount sexual contact with adults as
children[82], or generally to admit to have engaged in commonly termed
“deviant” sexual activity than adult heterosexual men. This is not because they
are actually more likely to have to, simply homosexuality is already seen by
heteropatriarchal society in a paradigm of deviance, which makes it easier for
them to talk about it. And also considering how often homosexuals have been
connected to children and childhood, it is probable that a gay man might be more
in connection with his boyhood, a feminized stage that hegemonic masculinity
encourages men to bury or face social ridicule. To muse, linger on a childhood
sexual relationship that is justified only by being in childhood, is bringing it to
the present day, thereby behaving in a feminine and childish manner. This might
be also the case of women, who are not encouraged to bury girlhood. Quite the
opposite, actually, girlhood is valued in the mature woman. As Gryctko said:
“This suggest a blurring of the line between girl and woman that cannot exist
between boy and mature man in a patriarchal society. While the adult man is
supposed to behave quite differently than his boyish self, and risks shunning if he
does not, the perfect girl is already part woman, who can never achieve the full
privileges of “adulthood” that are reserved for the man, retains some of her
“girlish” appeal”[83], part of that appeal is also talking about girlhood. It is true
that very often adult heterosexual men will idealize the pederastic environments
and relationships of their youth, but they explicitly desexualize them. In this
context, the boy is represented as wholly passive, meaning that he is not shown
to feel sexual desire, only endless admiration, and his “surrender” to the adult’s
desire is conceptualized as being a small, unpleasant but not too repulsive, price
to pay for the male socialization and introduction into patriarchal structures of
power. We’ve seen this model of the undesiring, worshipful boy who adores his
mentor and passively but unenthusiastically accepts his sexual advances from the
earliest times[84]. Miles and Quint’s relationship co exits between these two
models, as Miles never distances himself from this conception, as we’ve seen, but
his desire that we slowly discover casts doubt on that “unenthusiastically”.
Miles’s seems to get closer to our day’s views of the “groomed boy”, who were
already shadowing, as noted, in progressive sexology that did not reflect the
legal or wider Victorian view. Miles finds in normativity his sites of resistance.
Anyway, the accounts of homosexual men or about homosexual men subvert this
traditional trope, for they first of all represent the man as the object of the child’s
desires who reluctantly accepts his advances because he does not know better,
which is a subversion that can only exist in the context of a working class
man/upper class boy paradigm, but also because they subvert the usual class
distinction of the pederastic relationship, where the boy was most often the
disadvantaged, less wealthy partner.
There was also panic about the sexual corruption of higher class women at the
ends of male servants, even though female servants were most often victimized
by their employers, and that was also a concern at the time, as the relationship
between Quint and Miss Jessel shows (And also the uncle’s predatoriness
towards his governesses). And even between servants themselves, it was
common belief that children could become corrupted by witnessing sexual
intercourse between servants, this theory actually being the main one about what
“really happened” (Which is impossible to know, but both us and the governess
will not stop wondering until our perverse curiosities will be answered) between
the children and Quint and Jessel, until quite recently. The text also draws
attention to the ignorance of poor people in the character of Mrs.Grose, which
has often been understood as a social tactic to ensure their subordinated role.
What is also interesting his the parallelism between Quint and the uncle, as
we’ve seen it is largely implied that his presence was chosen by the uncle to
regulate the excessive freedom of women and children at Bly, and that the uncle
liked him and would not hear nothing against him, and that he was employed as
a role model for Miles, which is also problematical as I discussed in the first part
of this section. The uncle appeared to us at the beginning of the novel as the
typical 19th century patriarch and a representative of Victorian hegemonic
masculinity. But he is seemingly ignorant - or even complicit - of the threat that
Quint represents to his authority. That is embodied in the fact that he wore “the
master’s clothes”. As the novel tells us, the master only employed young and
pretty governesses that he desired sexually, the body of the younger,
subordinated female employee he conceptualized as something that belonged to
him, that they would “succumb” was without question. But it isn’t just him who
likes them young and pretty: “I recollect throwing off. “He seems to like us
young and pretty!” “Oh, he did,” Mrs. Grose assented: “it 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 coloured. “Why, of him.”“Of the master?”“Of
who else?”, the allusion being obviously to Quint’s sexual proclivities. At Bly,
Peter Quint appropriated a position of authority that he almost surely would have
never reached. Employing a “substitute” of him might have served the uncle’s
patriarchal needs - but only to a certain extent. In a patriarchal society, the wife
and the children are properties of the Father, considering Miles’s and Flora’s
father is dead, the uncle has taken upon that role. The servant in the 19th century
was reduced to a child of the “master”, this is why males in a position of
subservience historically have almost always referred to as “boys”[85]. Not only
then, Peter Quint sought to embody a role that was not what the role of the
servant was supposed to be in the 19th century, but he did something most
despicable - sexually corrupted the children, especially Miles, who represented
the future of the uncle, that he already projected on the boy by dressing him like
him (Ironically, he exploited the power that his “mature” clothing gave him to
intimidate the governess and further foster his connection with Quint, that he
definitely recognized as the patriarchal figure of authority at the moment, rather
than the uncle, the normative head of the house), definitely the Victorian era
would never hear a greater number of societal and sexual taboos than it would
while hearing about a relationships like that of Quint and Miles. Not only then,
Peter Quint despoiled the uncle’s property, but also his future, and the uncle was
the one to offer it to him on a silver plate. This could have easily been a real
cautionary tale of the time for masters to put even greater attention on the
morality of servants before employing them. This, at least according to the
governess’s point of view, who probably recognized in this outrageous behavior
and disrespect of authority, large part of Quint’s deviance.
In the next section, we will focus on the already often hinted at issue of the
ambivalence of children’s innocence, which is also the most important aspect of
this article. Several themes will be touched upon in this section (much more than
in the previous ones) and it will be the largest of the article. The analysis will
also be influenced by the three factors discussed in these three sections.

Puzzles of Ideal Childhood Innocence in The Turn Of The Screw
(1889) And Some Other Henry James’s Books.

In this section the central thesis of the article will be explored, in relation to the
book. Two other Henry James’s books will also be discussed, these are The
Author Of Beltraffio and The Pupil. These books also touch themes that are quite
similar to those touched in The Turn, they are all also comprised by characters
that eroticize children, and they all end with the death of a boy who “knew too
much”. The influence of the issues touched in the previous sections will also not
be downplayed.

The Turn’s principal theme is the loss of innocence both on the part of the
children and on that of the governess, as I’ve remarked. But were any of these
characters actually ever “innocent”? What is “innocence” in the first place?
Innocence doesn’t actually have any inherent value, now we know that
ignorance of affairs such as sex and money doesn’t make someone morally
superior, but we still idealize and expect children to be innocent. In the Victorian
era, where the innocent child originates in the first place, children who were not
innocent were harshly punished, and it was easier to be considered non-innocent.
The indulgence of the governess towards the children that she loses anyway as
the story progresses wasn’t the standard by no means. This was true even when
discussing children who were clearly the victims of adult actions. As I’ve hinted
at before, for example, children who accused men of sexual assault in the
Victorian era weren’t always believed and were often stigmatized as sexually
precious “temptresses” if female and calculating, financially scheming
blackmailers if male[86]. We would think not much changed judging from how
harshly punished are today’s non-innocent children, even if it’s somehow more
difficult for a child to be considered wicked today. Take as an example child
perpetrators of sex crimes. Originally, CSA was a paradigm that was invented
and sustained by feminists to highlight male sexual violence towards
children[87], particularly in the context of father-daughter incest, then feminists
began to extend the paradigm to other forms of child sexual abuse, like other
types of incest and non-incest abuse. Feminists theorized that child sexual abuse
wasn’t a deviant behavior for men, but that on the contrary male violence
towards children (and women) was normalized in our society. The boogey of
The Pedophile therefore was an invention created to mask male violence. In fact,
most child sexual abusers aren’t even men whose primary sexual attraction is
directed towards children (pedophiles), but heterosexual teleiophiles (men whose
primary sexual attraction is directed towards sexually mature females). Of
course feminists somehow oversimplified the issue, but that rape of children is
an issue tied to the patriarchy and adult male violence is irrevocably true.[88] But
today, the media constantly tries to deflect the attention from that fact (Like it
used to do with the boogey of the Pedophile, who is still well and alive) by
overly publicizing cases of “female perpetrators” (Who often, despite the media
and “Men’s rights activists”’s furore, get much harsher, not lighter, sentences as
compared to their male counterparts, like a woman who received a fourteen
years jail sentence for attempting to meet and engage in sexual intercourse with
a teenage boy[89], a crime that would have gotten a man less than a year in
prison, most likely), and even, most recently, of “child perpetrators”, often,
“child perpetrators” are just children who engaged in sexual play with a younger
boy or girl, or even children who have been reenacting the abuse they faced at
the hands of an adult. Actually, Lancaster, author of “Sex, Panic And The
Punitive State”, phrased it perfectly: “Children-who-molest, children-who-
harass, children-who-abuse are mostly children who fail to validate adult
fantasies of childhood innocence. And those fantasies are becoming increasingly
fantastic”[90]. “Child perpetrators”, it doesn’t matter how much our culture
attempts to stress the difference between adults and children, often receive the
same treatment reserved for their adult counterparts. But how does our culture
allow such a thing, so clearly contradictory, to happen? It strips these “child
perpetrators” of their identity of children, thereby exposing how unstable the
category of “child” is in the first place. After all, childishness and innocence are
constructs that still exclude certain categories of children, for example, black
children. Often, black boys are portrayed as sexually violent and aggressive,
while young adult white men who rape or assault women or children are often
infantilized and excused for their behavior[91]. But in the Victorian era, the non-
innocent child, was still, for the most part, a child. It is true that in some
moments of the novella, as I myself remarked, Miles and Flora are adultified,
because they are “corrupted”. But that itself is portrayed to us a result of the
corruption, and as unnatural. While today, we naturalize the adult-ness of the
previously mentioned “child perpetrators” or just juvenile criminals in general.
This naturalization is what allows so many countries to have incredibly high age
of consent laws contrasted with extremely low ages of criminal responsibility.
This naturalization is what allows police officers to ruin men’s (And very
recently, some women’s) lives for meeting up with non existent sixteen year old
teenagers but also to pepper spray eight year old (true, mostly black, but the
white juvenile criminal recently has been almost as adultified), children[92]. This
naturalization is what makes us accept this uncritically. Now let’s explore these
puzzles (and more) in the novel(s).

From their first meeting, as I’ve previously discussed, the governess idealizes
the beauty of the children, thereby reinforcing the idea of children as objects and
ornaments, and also the Victorian equivalence between physical beauty and good
character, an equivalence that the novel goes to disrupt, with its “handsome”
Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, and by exposing the inherently corrupted nature of
the children, this corruption being actually nothing more than expressions of
sexuality. The great, nameless Evil that James wanted us to feel in the novel, is
actually just child sexuality. It is seen as such by our governess, that has been
portrayed in many ways, most often the misogynistic caricature of the hysterical
woman, but she actually simply represent the Victorian educator who has been
taught about the dangers of child sexuality. Of course, she is fraught with
ambiguities. Her attitude towards the children is oppressive, as children are
subordinated to women as well as men[93], even if of course they have a greater
possibility of rebelling against a woman as I previously noted, even if in
different ways (Like for example in a more explicitly sexual paradigm, they are
not), Miles feels he can only escape her intrusion of his private life by assuming
the role of a man, but this has its limits, because of course, he isn’t one. She is
conscious, she recognizes the oppressiveness of her role in relation to the
children: “I might have appeared to provide against some danger of rebellion. I
was like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and escapes”. The main
target of today’s moral panics about child sexuality are also women, mainly
women whose entire lives are devoted to the care of children. Women were
historically alienated by men in roles similar to that of the governess, roles
devoted to the care of prepubescents (I already touched upon the change of space
boys accomplished when they became adolescents, even if they found
themselves in a subject position in those spaces, as we will see), were they were
also given, despite the oppressiveness of the role, an almost unrestricted power
over those children. Women, with children being the only subjects women were
allowed to exercise authority over in a patriarchal society, were always anxious
to exercise it by overly surveilling and regulating their activities. The panic
about child sexuality explicitly allows women, but men too, to invade children’s
intimate lives and punish any sort of sexual manifestation, this being not totally
dissimilar to the way men have controlled and restricted female sexuality, think
of the familiar justification of these social phenomenons, the protection and
safety of women and children is almost always invoked. But there have also
been portrayals of the governess as the evil Third Woman disrupting the
pederastic bond between Miles and Peter Quint, but they mainly pertained to the
opera, and they will be explored in the sections devoted to the opera, despite
Gryctko’s article being mainly about the novel, but most such portrayals of the
governess differ from Gryctko’s interpretation[94], as she is supposed, as I said
before, to represent Miles’s past rather than his future. This contraposition
between the benign patriarchal authority of Peter Quint as opposed to the
malignant matriarchal authority of the governess is, profoundly sexist, an
expression of misogyny, and echoes as I already mentioned modern discourses
of “male role models” and relations between women and boys that are also
telling of the inherent pedophilia of our culture, Sedgwick’s brilliant theories
about homoeroticism in our patriarchal society[95] have been very influent, and
there is an emergency of a re-reading of those theories in the context of
pedophilia, rather than homoeroticism, because our culture’s treatment of both
forms of commonly termed “deviant” eroticism are reminiscent (Homosexuality
now is in a much better social position as opposed to pedophilia, but is is
understandable as homosexuals’s sexual violence on men is almost non existent
except in homophobic moral panics, where often it also had to be reimagined as
pedophilia[96] because of how actually rare the sexual assault of adult males is,
while adult men’s sexual violence on children is still a very important problem in
our society, but I agree with the traditional feminist position that it’s largely not
the responsibility of the deviant minority of pedophiles, but of patriarchal culture
as a whole. Nevertheless in traditional male culture open homoeroticism is still
as abhorred). But despite that, I had to precise that the governess veritably has an
oppressive role in relation to the children, as the fight between the governess and
Quint is itself telling of, which situates the child as switching from the role of a
property to women to a property of men, but not becoming a full on person with
autonomy over his own body until he becomes a man, before beginning the real
analysis, which will talk of the adult/child dynamic. This will be useful also in
the analysis of Dolcino’s mother in The Author Of Beltraffio.

The novel opens with the triggering event of the letter which announces Miles’s
expulsion from school: “I winced at my mistake, which I attenuated as I could,
and opened my letter again to repeat it to her; then, faltering in the act and
folding it up once more, I put it back in my pocket. "Is he really bad?" The tears
were still in her eyes. "Do the gentlemen say so?” "They go into no particulars.
They simply express their regret that it should be impossible to keep him. That
can have only one meaning." Mrs. Grose listened with dumb emotion; she
forbore to ask me what this meaning might be; so that, presently, to put the thing
with some coherence and with the mere aid of her presence to my own mind, I
went on: "That he's an injury to the others." At this, with one of the quick turns
of simple folk, she suddenly flamed up. "Master Miles! Him an injury?”” To
Mrs.Grose it is impossible to believe that such a sweet, beautiful and well
behaved child could be an “injury”. Much of the story actually bases itself on the
difficulty the adults face in accepting children’s humanity. The difficulty they
face in accepting the possibility that despite the idealization of the Child - they
may actually just be humans after all, and sexual humans at that. Children have
historically been victimized by a paradox - That considered them both less than
human and more than human, simultaneously. The Turn also comments on how
tiring the performance of childhood innocence and purity is, Miles and Flora
actually know more than the governess does, they play with her, as we’ve seen
and we will further see. The sense of this aspect of the novel can be
encompassed by this line the governess thinks while talking to Miles: “It was
extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret precocity (or whatever I
might call the poison of an influence that I dared but half to phrase) made him,
in spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble, appear as accessible as an older
person—imposed him almost as an intelligent equal”, the sexualized Miles is
“almost” an “intelligent equal” to her because he is free from the oppressive
constraint of the Innocent, Pure idealized Child, because through his sexuality,
he has reclaimed his humanity. Going back to the expulsion, what the story
opens with and what the whole story will be centered on is a sexualized event.
Miles’s injurious behavior is obviously sexual conduct, as he himself will reveal
at the end. “There was such a flood of good faith in it that, though I had not yet
seen the child, my very fears made me jump to the absurdity of the idea. 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”,
the sarcastic remark the governess makes about the “poor little innocents mates”
is telling because it’s one of the very first revelatory remarks that the governess
makes in regards to the knowledge that the environment of the kind of schools
Miles attended is fraught with sexual danger. Mrs.Grose wonders, “he is only ten
years old”, thereby revealing that she herself thought about sexualized conduct
despite her ignorance. Elite boys’s schools like that of Miles were very strict, so
it would have been natural to think that boyish mischief might have been the
cause of the expulsion, to whom “but he is only ten years old” wouldn’t have
been a defense, because he would have acted that way because he is ten years
old, but she immediately thinks of something that in her mind a ten year old boy
is incapable of - sex. “She was evidently grateful for such a profession. "See him,
miss, first. Then believe it!" I felt forthwith a new impatience to see him; it was
the beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next hours, was to deepen almost to
pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of what she had produced in me, and
she followed it up with assurance. "You might as well believe it of the little lady.
Bless her," she added the next moment—"Look at her!” their beautiful childish
appearance immediately tells Mrs.Grose that they could never do anything un-
childlike. "I take what you said to me at noon as a declaration that you've never
known him to be bad." She threw back her head; she had clearly, by this time,
and very honestly, adopted an attitude. "Oh, never known him—I don't pretend
that!" I was upset again. "Then you have known him—?""Yes indeed, miss, thank
God!"On reflection I accepted this. "You mean that a boy who never is—?""Is no
boy for me!”, children have to be naughty, so that we can beat them, as Kincaid
explained[97], but not too naughty. There are clear boundaries. Childhood
sexuality, is not, for the Victorians, naughty, it is, Evil. It’s Contamination, it’s
Corruption, as she simplifies for Mrs.Grose: “I held her tighter. "You like them
with the spirit to be naughty?" Then, keeping pace with her answer, "So do I!" I
eagerly brought out. "But not to the degree to contaminate—“ "To
contaminate?"—my big word left her at a loss. I explained it. "To corrupt.””.
Immediately after the discussion of Miles’s expulsion, they discuss the fact that
he liked them young and pretty (the governesses), but who? The master, who
else? The governess has the impression that Mrs.Grose has said “more than she
meant”, this being a reference to Peter Quint. So, Miles and Quint are already
tied together by a bond that is sexualized, as the discussion pertains to their
respective sexual conducts. Miles, at the boarding school, being ten years old
and “pretty”, definitely covered the role of the younger boy that was sexually
pursued by older ones[98]. Very often younger boys were victims of sexual
harassment and assault, what I was referencing when I talked about boys’s
subjection in the spaces that are supposed to socialize them into manhood (We
see it today as well, with, as I already mentioned, associations like the Boy
Scouts in bankruptcy because of sexual assault claims from former scouts),
which is learned by covering a subordinate position as children and a more
dominant one as older youths, that was epitomized in the system of fagging, an
important instrument in the socialization of these boys[99]. But these shouldn’t
lead to the erasure of child sexuality, not all age structured sexual contacts were
coerced. Definitely those contacts fit the paradigm of “danger and possibility”
delineated by Houlbrook[100]. In Mrs.Grose’s mind, there is an implicit
connection between this sort of conduct by Miles at school and Quint’s
predatoriness towards “young and pretty governesses”, it will get more marked
as the story progresses, despite the governess attempts at the otherization of
Quint the Pedophile. It is rendered almost explicit in the opera. The moment the
governess sets her gaze on Miles the “erotic innocence” of the Victorian child
renders itself clear: ”We met, after I had brought home little Miles, more
intimately than ever on the ground of my stupefaction, my general emotion: so
monstrous was I then ready to pronounce it that such a child as had now been
revealed to me should be under an interdict. I was a little late on the scene, and I
felt, as he stood wistfully looking out for me before the door of the inn at which
the coach had put him down, that I had seen him, on the instant, without and
within, in the great glow of freshness, the same positive fragrance of purity, in
which I had, from the first moment, seen his little sister. He was incredibly
beautiful, and Mrs. Grose had put her finger on it: everything but a sort of
passion of tenderness for him was swept away by his presence. 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, and by the time I had got back to Bly with him I
remained merely bewildered—so far, that is, as I was not outraged—by the sense
of the horrible letter locked up in my room, in a drawer. As soon as I could
compass a private word with Mrs. Grose I declared to her that it was grotesque.
She promptly understood me. "You mean the cruel charge—?" "It doesn't live an
instant. My dear woman, look at him!” Physical beauty mends itself with non-
physical attributes like purity and innocence, that she nevertheless only affirms
he has by admiring his beauty, but he knows nothing in the world but love. In
fact, their greatest preoccupation is that he knows love and other sexualized
emotions. And yet, they confirm that they must have been wrong about him - he
is too child to have been human, sexual. There are other references to Miles
being too pure for the world he inhabits, especially of his school, which reveal to
us that the governess knows a lot of the pederastic world of the nineteenth
century boys’s school: “There was one direction, assuredly, in which these
discoveries stopped: deep obscurity continued to cover the region of the boy's
conduct at school. It had been promptly given me, I have noted, to face that
mystery without a pang. Perhaps even it would be nearer the truth to say that—
without a word—he himself had cleared it up. He had made the whole charge
absurd. My conclusion bloomed there with the real rose flush of his innocence:
he was only too fine and fair for the little horrid, unclean school world, and he
had paid a price for it. I reflected acutely that the sense of such differences, such
superiorities of quality, always, on the part of the majority—which could include
even stupid, sordid headmasters—turn infallibly to the vindictive”, the governess
imagines that not only Miles is too beautiful, too pure, too innocent for such a
charge (Why is this charge in contradiction with Miles’s character when we do
not even know what it is? Only problem is, we do. We want to know the details)
to be leveled against him, but he is so also for the “little horrid, unclean school
world” he was part of, we are made to imagine, by the governess, an institution
filled with sexually predatory young men who created an environment where
young, delicate boys like Miles could only fall victim to sexual exploitation and
be blamed for it. But she goes even further, claiming that not only Miles’s older
mates would have hounded him, but also “sordid headmasters”, “sordid” being a
word generally associated with sexuality, deviant, “dirty” sexuality. This stands
to mean that not only the adult male staff of the school would have been
complicit in the institutionalized sexual abuse of the younger boys, but also
actively participated in it. The governess’s account, like most contemporary
accounts of pedophilia in institutions, is filled with half-truths and exaggerations.
There is a basis of truth to her account, as previously noted, as illustrated, for
example, in John Addington Symonds’s memoirs: “One thing at Harrow very
soon arrested my attention. It was the moral state of the school. Every boy of
good looks had a female name, and was recognized either as a public prostitute
or as some bigger fellow’s ‘bitch’. Bitch was the word in common usage to
indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover. The talk in the dormitories and
the studies was incredibly obscene”[101], but also, “The conclusion which I drew
from this very inadequate form of punishment was that our masters did not
realize what the matter meant, and how widespread was the evil in the school…
In the month of January 1858 Alfred Pretor wrote me a note in which he
informed me that Vaughan had begun a love affair with him. I soon found that
the boy was not lying, because he showed me a series of passionate letters
written to him by our headmaster”[102], on the other hand though, in a lot of
schools those sort of relationships limited themselves to platonic crushes
younger boys and older boys developed for each other, like in the novel Tim, that
received Henry James’s praise[103], and even if sexual experimentation took
place, it did not have to be necessarily coercive. But in the Victorian era, and in
our society as well, it’s was, and is much easier to believe that a child has been
raped rather than that a child has engaged in consensual sexual activity with an
adult or significantly older youth. What differentiates the Victorian era from our
society is that while in our society we excuse the child that has engaged in
consensual sexual activity with an adult or older youth when it is impossible to
prove that they have been raped, by saying that they were manipulated and
completely denying their agency, for whom we also invented a term, grooming,
the same was not true in the Victorian era, for most regular people and the law,
and had its limits even for the most “modern” of the Victorians. This is why the
governess tells us: “Both the children had a gentleness (it was their only fault,
and it never made Miles a muff)…”, “muff” being obviously a code word for an
excessively feminine boy[104], which brings us not only to the issue of the
ambivalence of childhood innocence, which was presumptively not conceded to
children who bore the marks of perversion, to precocious young “inverts”,
which, unlike the “normal” boy who admires and idolizes, even “crushes on” a
man or an older youth, was represented as predatory, and most importantly,
explicitly sexual in his desires towards men in the sexological literature of the
time, despite the fact that we see this tendency today as well (Even accounts by
contemporary pedophiles openly reveal that most pedophiles attracted to boys
find queer identified boys to be intimidating, and see it as a failure if a boy with
whom they had sexual contact with grows up to be homosexual[105]), the way the
sexological literature of the time conceptualized the child who will be an
“invert” in adulthood would sound to us uncomfortably pedophilic, in fact, even
the LGBT community itself, today is not comfortable anymore with accounts of
child sexuality from adult homosexual men, who generally tend to describe
incidences of child sexual experimentation even with much older people as non-
traumatic. This ambivalence which proves that absolute childhood innocence
was by no means an established category in the Victorian Era is also found in
other works of the time of great importance, including “Tom Brown’s
Schooldays”, where a younger boy is described as such: “He was one of the
miserable little pretty white-handed curly-headed boys, petted and pampered by
some of the big fellows”[106], the author tells us he can’t strike out the passage
despite “many noble friendships” between boys of different ages, and “many
boys will know why it is left in”[107]. The boy is portrayed negatively by the
protagonist, he calls him “The worst sort we breed”, telling his friend “Thank
goodness, no big fellow ever took to petting me”, his friend responds by
declaring “You’d never have been like that”[108], which tells us that Hughes, and
most of his contemporaries believed that certain children, those “like that”,
weren’t innocent and even deserving of what today we would call sexual
harassment. The governess too assures us that Miles is not like that, which
translates in the fact that he, unlike other boys, doesn’t deserve to be treated as if
he was. We’ve already seen this tendency when I mentioned how it is true, she
recognized that women dealt with rape everyday in the Victorian era when she
first saw Quint on the tower, but by her depiction of Miss Jessel, she made it
clear that she didn’t figure men’s sexual aggression as negative per se, but only
as negative when (mis)directed at “good women” like her. As I said, her line
doesn’t only bring us to this issue, but also to that of the mixed messages boys
received in the Victorian era about how to behave, considering that in Tom
Brown’s Schooldays, our protagonist, of whose author previously reassured
wouldn’t have let himself get molested, doesn’t encourage his young
impressionable boy readers to resist to the authority of older mates, quite the
opposite: He idolizes a much older boy named Brooke, and when he is made to
serve as a fag for him he views it as a privilege and honor: "Tom, in the first
blush of his hero-worship, felt it a high privilege to receive orders from and be
the bearer of the supper of old Brooke”[109], most often fagging was a very
degrading institution that was meant to make up for the lack of servants in
boarding schools and to socialize children into patriarchal structures of power,
which makes me think of what a conflicting message this must have been to the
boys reading Tom Brown’s, that they must serve and submit to older boys who
held almost as much power in the school as did masters, but if they failed to fend
off their sexual advances, it would somehow be their fault, especially
considering also the association between Tom and Arthur, which has all the
tropes of pederasty (and the common trope of the angelic child softening up a
though man, even if here it’s an older boy). The same is true of gendered
expectations, boys in the Victorian Era, and as I often say, indeed today as well
had to be, as Miles is, gentle but not too gentle, or they would be “muffs”,
embody all of the feminine characteristic associated with childhood but not
openly appearing as feminine or they would face scorn and be characterized as
perverted, embody some traditionally masculine characteristic but not all of
them or they would be seen as unnatural as Miles is when he wears the clothes
his uncle gave him, understand that they have privilege but that somehow they
can’t exercise it now, be flung into all male spaces where they would feel like
outsiders and be characterized by the men and older youths as other, and so on.
This paradigm is also similar to the previously mentioned one about behavior,
where I mentioned that the expectation was they would be bad but not too bad,
“not to the degree to contaminate”, as the governess puts it. This must have been
- and is - tiring, the burden of the performance of boyhood and just childhood in
general weighing very heavily on these isolated children at the house of Bly. We
see that because Miles actually transgresses all of these rules, sometimes he
behaves like a woman, other times like a man, and, what puts the governess most
at ease, he can also be a boy. He is capable of seducing both men and women
thanks to the androgyny of his looks and the instability of the concept of “boy”.
He can be bad-to-the-degree-to-contaminate, but he can also be simply boyishly
naughty and have the governess wonder, but never explicitly, if she is in the
wrong. He exposed her, the picture of a lot of Victorian and even our time’s
educators, as a fool, a fool we hurried to condemn to set her apart from us, to
make her Other, because we didn’t realize, or maybe because we did, that she is
us. He owns it, he controls it, he reclaims those oppressive standards as sites of
childish power, while still remaining a normative character, because his
resistance to them in this context of embodying all of them, echoes them. What is
the difference between the transgressions of those standards and the standards
themselves, he asks us? That makes the governess crazy. She can’t stand it. But
we know she loves it. She does too much, that’s why he dies (She kills him?).
Might their reactions to the oppressive constraints of performing their identities
be what the governess characterizes as the Unspeakable Evil? During her
description of Miles being too pure for his school the governess of course also
visualized, and made us visualize, this supremely beautiful child being violated
by “horrid, unclean” older mates and “sordid" headmasters, what we today
would term as, “pedophiles”, the famous “guilt-free pornographic fantasy”,
excellently described in Kincaid’s works. The young corrupted by the old, the
beautiful defiled by the ugly, those are some of the biggest pornographic
fantasies in the contemporary world as well, and the governess, at this point of
the novel, and she will never stop, is sexually fantasizing about the children,
about children. To remain in theme with the discussion of the English boys’s
boarding school, I will cite the testimony of a former Eton student, published in
1988 in the book “Eton Voices”:
“In my house, in my circle, nobody dared do a bloody thing, except one fat boy,
who was generally despised, who got hold of - by some miracle - the prettiest
boy in the house. I think the most erotic moment of my life was when this boy
everybody fancied, called B--, was with this dreadful sleazy fat man called S--. I
was in the room below S—‘s, and I had my window open one summer night, and
I heard B-- saying, ‘Oh S--, don’t. Oh S--, S-- . . . Oh S— ‘Oh B--, Oh B--, Oh, B-
-!’ ‘Oh S--.’ I was absolutely going mad with lust because he was such a
beautiful boy, but the awful thought of this dreadful creature managing to get
hold of the object of everybody’s desire - I can’t remember anything quite so
erotic in my life.”[110]
“The awful thought”, “I can’t remember anything quite so erotic in my life”, this
is exactly how erotic innocence operates.
“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. He
had never for a second suffered. I took this as a direct disproof of his having
really been chastised. If he had been wicked he would have "caught" it, and I
should have caught it by the re- bound—I should have found the trace. I found
nothing at all, and he was therefore an angel. He never spoke of his school,
never mentioned a comrade or a master; and I, for my part, was quite too much
disgusted to allude to them”, she is sure Miles is as I said, above humanity, an
“angel”, a figure that has always been associated with (white) boys and boyhood
despite the fact that the angels in the original sacred texts are often represented
as men, and not always benign[111]. Because the association between boys and
angels (or certain animals like lambs, which also are much tied to the religious
imagery) transcends anything religious, it is only telling of a series of cultural
stereotypes associated with childhood. She denies by doing so his humanity, as it
is evident by her insistence on the fact that he has never suffered, even though no
one reaches the age of ten without ever having suffered. This is like her
observation that he has never felt any other emotion other than (non-sexual)
“love” (defined very vaguely), negative or sexual emotions today as well as in
the Victorian era were forbidden to children, defined as un-childlike, Miles
cannot feel hate, Miles cannot feel lust, according to the governess. Those
emotions are too human. Today, if a child feels hate, lust, or both we believe that
either those emotions aren’t really hate, lust or both, or that the child in question
simply isn’t a child. Her comment on being too disgusted to allude to the school
is disproved by her almost obsessive desire to know what went on there, in
detail, as she has already told us that she has a vague idea about what went on
there. Soon after thinking this is when she sees Quint, for the second time, at the
window, declaring he has come there for someone else. This, and her subsequent
talk with Mrs.Grose, could easily be a prolongation to her sexual fantasy about
the school. Her confrontation with Mrs.Grose after seeing Quint for the second
time (The first time she sees him on the tower while thinking about the uncle,
thereby drawing a parallelism between the two characters as I’ve already
explored) is one of the most impressive portions of the book. After the whole
conversations that we’ve already analyzed the governess is sure: "He was
looking for little Miles." A portentous clearness now possessed me. "That's
whom he was looking for." "But how do you know?" "I know, I know, I know!"
My exaltation grew. "And you know, my dear!”, Mrs.Grose’s question, that she
shuts up, was fair, how does she know? She knows because if she was the ghost
of a “tall, active and erect” dead manservant she would also be looking for
lovely little Miles. She tells Mrs.Grose that deep down she does know as well,
appealing to her deepest fears about the wellbeing of the children, like every
moral panic does. She knows already that Mrs.Grose did not like Quint, and was
even a bit afraid of him when he was alive, from the way she reacted to her
description. Appealing to the emotions of people and convincing them they are
acting dishonestly by denying something “obvious” are all very important
features of moral panics. “She didn't deny this, but I required, I felt, not even so
much telling as that”, she tells us. From them, then, we read, according to my
reading, one of the most important passages about the puzzles of childhood
innocence in The Turn: “She resumed in a moment, at any rate: "What if he
should see him?" "Little Miles? That's what he wants!” She looked immensely
scared again. "The child?” "Heaven forbid! The man. He wants to appear to
them”, Quint The Exhibitionist wants to “appear” to Miles, but he doesn’t want
to see, she is sure of that. Mrs.Grose’s suggestion that “that’s what he wants”
could refer to Miles’s desire to see Quint is immediately warded off, and with
horror: “Heaven forbid!”, Mrs.Grose herself looks “immensely scared” of the
prospect that she is suggesting, even if her ignorance allows her to voice the
question. But the governess doesn’t know it’s not “what the child wants” but
what the “man wants”, this opposition between “man” and “child” clearly
delineating the role of “man” as sexually aggressive predator and “child” as
sexually passive imperiled victim, she hasn’t talked to Miles about anything of
this, as adults never talk to children about the problems that involve them
directly, no one cares about what a child thinks, so Miles might as well actually
be dying to see Quint, as Oates’s reimagining, “Accursed Inhabitants Of The
House Of Bly”, portrays. Which tells us this isn’t in the first place about what
Miles wants - but about what the governess would want him to want. As she has
already told us, he is a good boy, who is pure, innocent, gentle like a proper child
but “not a muff” (That’s a lot of stuff!), he does not want to see a man, much less
a “erect” one (As I said, a child that would want to today would be protrayed as
misguided, manipulated, “groomed”, at best, victim of his inherently innocent
“childhood curiosities”, because child sexuality, when it is acknowledged is
protrayed as innocent itself, in the Victorian era this “luxury” was still not
allowed children, not in most discourses). Critics who purported that he might
have wanted that, as I hinted at, implied that he did not for the sake of it - But to
get away from an all-female world he is supposed to be getting tired of and
receive his socialization from his mentor and “male role model” (Even if a
deviant one as I said, servants were protrayed outside the legal discourse as
“corrupting” boys, when they were not “perverse”, exactly because they couldn’t
be the model a upper class boy aspires to), the traditional heterosexual paradigm
of positively experienced pederasty, disempowering boys by stripping away the
revolutionary potential of a child desiring a man, even if how much he did
always casts this into doubt. But the governess says “Heaven forbid!”, there is
an unanswered question that colors this interaction - if he did want it - What
would that mean for him? Her comment suggest that it would mean that he must
die. She prefers not to think about it, but soon she will have to. This conversation
is not so dissimilar from the situation of two women today discussing how a
child has reacted to an act of indecent exposure, if as I said, we take out the
implication that Miles would have been unredeemable if he did not react
negatively.
After this interaction between the governess and Mrs.Grose, Mrs.Grose will tell
the governess in often quoted passages that Quint used to take too many liberties
with Miles for the first time. She tells him that Flora wouldn’t know much about
Quint’s stay at Bly, and the governess thinks that Miles on the contrary, she
emphasizes, would. The conversation proceeds: “Ah, don’t try him!” broke from
Mrs. Grose. I returned her the look she had given me. “Don’t be afraid.” I
continued to think. “It is rather odd.” “That he has never spoken of him?”
“Never by the least allusion. And you tell me they were ‘great friends’?”, and
finally, the famous line: “Oh, it wasn’t him!” Mrs. Grose with emphasis
declared. “It was Quint’s own fancy. To play with him, I mean—to spoil him.”
She paused a moment; then she added: “Quint was much too free”, it wasn’t
him, Mrs.Grose cares about highlighting the fact that it was not Miles’s fault, an
idea that Mrs.Grose also stresses as I noted in the adaptation “The Innocents”, as
we’ve seen, that is put into question by moments such as Miles’s recitation of his
poem "What shall I sing to my lord from my window? What shall I sing for my
lord will not stay?”[112], and an idea contested by Oates’s short story, it wasn’t
him who went to seek Quint’s attentions, it was Quint’s idea, Mrs.Grose’s
comment on how it wasn’t a desire of Miles to spend time with the servant gave
rise to theories that would credit the interpretation that Quint forced Miles into
sexual contact, or at the very least, to share his company when he did not desire
to do so, but the idea isn’t tenable, as other moments in the story will prove.
Mrs.Grose says that Quint “spoiled” Miles, the word “spoil” assuming a
multitude of meanings: It could mean that he has “spoiled” him in the traditional
sense of the word when applied to children, coddled him, pampered him, ect, but
also that he has ruined him, tainted him. If that is the correct interpretation, it is
normal that Mrs.Grose insists on Miles’s lack of interest in spending time with
Quint, she believes that the kind of boy who would spend time with him
voluntarily is spoiled and contributed to his own spoiling. The governess’s
reaction to this revelation is telling: “This gave me, straight from my vision of his
face—such a face!—a sudden sickness of disgust. “Too free with my boy?””,
imagining a man with “such a face” taking advantage of beautiful innocent
Miles, makes her sick and disgusted but also arouses her, the disgust only
enhancing her arousal, in fact she also says “Too free with my boy?”, placing
emphasis on “my”, she believes she is the only one that should have the right to
do those things with Miles, the line isn’t, “too free with a boy?”, but “too free
with my boy?”, implying that what makes Quint’s behavior particularly heinous
is not the inappropriate liberality of his dealings with a child, not even the
possible breaching of said child’s consent, but his audacity in despoiling the
governess’s property, who at that time is a stand in for the uncle, every
masculinized lesbian pedophile, and ourselves. Mrs.Grose then explains the
governess, why she didn’t tell the uncle, who wouldn’t have listened to what a
woman said about a man he liked anyhow: “She felt my discrimination. “I dare
say I was wrong. But, really, I was afraid.” “Afraid of what?” “Of things that
man could do. Quint was so clever—he was so deep.” I took this in still more
than, probably, I showed. “You weren’t afraid of anything else? Not of his effect
—?” “His effect?” she repeated with a face of anguish and waiting while I
faltered. “On innocent little precious lives. They were in your charge.”, what
exactly that effect might be is of course not specified like everything else in The
Turn, but obviously, like the nameless Evil, it has something to do with child
sexuality. “No, they were not in mine!” she roundly and distressfully returned.
“The master believed in him and placed him here because he was supposed not
to be well and the country air so good for him. So he had everything to say.
Yes”—she let me have it—“even about them.” “Them—that creature?” I had to
smother a kind of howl. “And you could bear it!” “No. I couldn’t—and I can’t
now!” And the poor woman burst into tears”, the governess isn’t contented with
leaving to herself the thought of bad men molesting pure children, she intends to
make others visualize it as well, “Them-that creature?”, those “innocent little
precious” children and that creature? Such a thought does make Mrs.Grose burst
into tears, but she has thought that, a poor elderly woman who doesn’t even
know how to read, made to think such things, when she probably doesn’t even
know how the most normative forms of sex work. She is making Peter Quint be
persistent presence in the life of Mrs.Grose who would have rather preferred to
forget him forever, more literally by having him come back from the dead. This
Peter Quint, in whose life “There had been matters…—strange passages and
perils, secret disorders, vices more than suspected—that would have accounted
for a good deal more”, she makes us think, linger on those perils, those secret
disorders, those vices more than suspected, more than we would like (or more
than we think we would like), by making us feel we have an obligation to. Much
like our culture does on the contemporary pedophile. “People do not like to think
about children getting molested”, a lot of stories on the supposed “silence” over
child sexual abuse tell us, every time I read or hear this sentence I would want to
reply, to the risk of sounding insensitive “You do?”, the truth is that we love it.
We absolutely love to hear about children getting sexually assaulted, no matter
how graphic the stories are. Self help or psychiatric books about child sexual
abuse are filled with gruesome, graphic tales that sometimes could be even
classified as, quite sadistic, erotic literature[113]. What we actually dread to hear
about, what actually scares us, is a child expressing their own sexuality,
especially with an older person, without coercion. Depictions of sexual children
are much more heavily censored than depictions of raped children, Stockton, in
her book, offers an example of that when she compares the reception of “Bastard
Out Of Carolina”, which contains a graphic depiction of the rape of a young
girl, with the reception of the 1997’s version of “Lolita”[114], which is about
child sexual abuse, but presents to us a child, that yes, was very much under the
control of an oppressive abuser, but who was also sexual with both children and
adults out of her own volition. What disturbs us, most of all, is the child’s
consent and their agency. But our culture’s fetish for the raped child does not
help anyone, and yet we are compelled to perpetuate it, because it’s either that or
“be part of the problem”, we are made feel the same way the governess makes
Mrs.Grose feel. Guilty for not succeeding to think enough of the rape of pretty
children. The governess then says: “I was there to protect and defend the little
creatures in the world the most bereaved and the most loveable, the appeal of
whose helplessness had suddenly become only too explicit, a deep, constant ache
of one’s own committed heart”, the “paternalistic” role of protector of the
weak(er) she assigns herself, in common with so many women today as well,
reveals itself as a patriarchal façade thanks to her own words: “We were cut off,
really, together; we were united in our danger. They had nothing but me, and I—
well, I had them”, the oppression of women and children is intertwined, the
helplessness she attributes to Miles and Flora is the same helplessness men
attribute to her, and that she attributes to herself, in fact, she does recognize that
as we see. “It was in short a magnificent chance. This chance presented itself to
me in an image richly material. I was a screen—I was to stand before them. The
more I saw, the less they would”, her masochistic ethos of self sacrifice, a
sacrifice devoted to preserving the purity of these fragile creatures, is the same
men are taught to have towards women, particularly in the Victorian era, but
today as well - In fact, many prosecutions of marginalized groups have been
promulgated by men in defense of (white, well-behaving) “women and
children”, think of the way black men have been historically victimized to
protect white femininity, or how homosexuals or just promoters of non-
normative and/or free sexuality have been prosecuted “to protect our children”.
Of course, this also permitted privileged men to not be held accountable for
abusing women and children, think of the fact that the Catholic Church has been
one of the pillars of the ideology that “sexual perversion” needed to be fought
against for the protection of children, while protecting for decades abusers of
children and women as well (nuns, for example[115]) in its ranks (The sexual
abuse of children and its subsequent coverups has a long history in the Catholic
Church, as Dyan Elliot’s recent masterful book has shown[116]). Mrs.Grose,
while discussing Jessel and Flora’s relationship, will ask a provocative question:
“Dear, dear—we must keep our heads! And after all, if she doesn’t mind it—!”
She even tried a grim joke. “Perhaps she likes it!” “Likes such things—a scrap
of an infant!” “Isn’t it just a proof of her blessed innocence?” my friend bravely
inquired”, if Flora likes being sexualized by Miss Jessel, she should be left
alone, Mrs.Grose bravely and remarkably declares. Flora and Miles are not
characters that are imprisoned in the time the novel was written, they can be
easily applied to our times as well, The Turn is a book for our times, it places
under the spotlight such a contemporary and inflammatory subject as childhood
sexuality. Flora is the girl who likes to try on make up, to wear the clothes
outraged journalists insist “sexualize young girls”, who loves all the bad women
television keeps reminding her she should not imitate, who resists the idea that
her culture is trying to teach her: That if she behaves a certain way, it would be
her fault if “something bad happens”, it’s well known that “bad things do not
happen to good girls”, even if her culture refuses to tell her what actually are
those “bad things”. Following this interpretation, she is very close to those
demonic girls of the controversial Netflix production “Cuties”[117], the reaction
of people to it, not so far off from things we would see as draconian today - Like
Mary Whitehouse’s crusade against “The Romans In Britain”[118] (Which
apparently we decided was okay because it showed a raped child rather than a
sexual one, and even better, played by a man rather than a boy) - Like Mary
Whitehouse’s every crusade - proves exactly why we need hear narratives of
sexual children much more frequently. But Mrs.Grose’s too, desexualizes the
sexual girl, in a strikingly modern way: “Isn’t it just a proof of her blessed
innocence?”, children have the power of desexualizing sex, as I’ve already
implied, but this isn’t as modern as we might think, because the girl who
innocently imitates the woman “without knowing what she’s doing” (children
never know that) has always, even in the past, been for us a source of
amusement and erotic titillation - but also been a picture of innocence, because
she might know how to imitate a woman, but doesn’t posses her malice. What is
on the contrary new, is that we construe the girl who does posses malice as a
victim, “groomed" by our “sexualized”culture and possibly by “bad men” as
well (A sexy girl is never sexy for boys, she is so for men or older youths, as
much as a sexy boy isn’t sexy for girls - as Kincaid explains “adorable kids
aren’t meant for other adorable kids”[119]), which has no precedent in the past.
Mrs.Grose now explains to the governess the “infamous” cross class relationship
between Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, and Quint is described as: “There was a
way to deal with that, and I dealt; the more readily for my full vision—on the
evidence—of our employer’s late clever, good-looking “own” man; impudent,
assured, spoiled, depraved. “The fellow was a hound”, interesting how clear this
makes that the uncle is supposed to be Quint’s angelic counterpart, where in him
the normatively masculine characteristic such as self confidence and success
with women represent a flattering portrayal of an upper class Victorian man, in
Quint they represent depravity and perversion. But the key difference between
these two, aside from their class difference, which is somehow not a problem
when the poorer counterpart is the woman (The uncle and his young and pretty
governesses) but it is so when it is the man, is that Quint “depravity” not only
does not limit itself to women, even if they are ladies above him, but also to
children, and the Master’s nephew in whose future he has so much faith, at that:
“Mrs. Grose considered as if it were perhaps a little a case for a sense of shades.
“I’ve never seen one like him. He did what he wished.” “With her?”“With them
all””, that being an obvious reference to Miles with whom it is already
established he was “too free”. Miles in the contemporary world might seem as a
less empowered figure than the “hypothetical” Flora I’ve just mentioned. The
figure that we’ve already seen, of the (male) attention starved fatherless boy,
who can’t help but fall prey to a man with less wholesome intentions because of
how great his need for a “mentor” is, the cautionary tale for Victorian men like
the uncle who are too busy to take care of their children or children who have
been entrusted to them, at least the boys, who projected in the contemporary
world is being raised by a single mother and looks for his role models in all the
wrong places, the internet being one of the main examples, appears to us, for the
reasons I laid out before, shockingly normative. But there is much more to
Miles, the novel will soon show us, because of how he exposes the same
normativity he represents, by finding power in all its contradictions and blind
spots. The reference I made to women and children’s sexuality being considered
very similar, particularly in the Victorian Era, is proved by this passage: “I
seemed at any rate, for an instant, to see their evocation of her as distinctly as I
had seen her by the pond; and I brought out with decision: “It must have been
also what she wished!” Mrs. Grose’s face signified that it had been indeed, but
she said at the same time: “Poor woman—she paid for it!””, female sexuality,
is, when not wholly passive like what the governess’s was supposed to be
towards the uncle, is something to be punished. Miss Jessel has to pay for it, if
“she wanted it”. The differences with child sexuality could seem clear by this,
rather than the similarity, because of how it is the governess herself who readily
accepts that Miss Jessel desired the sexual contact as much as Quint did, and
how the attempts to prove her innocence aren’t much, but soon the governess
will start realizing it is also what the children want, and that they have to be
rescued from themselves, rather than from the ghosts. That, her insistence on
“saving” them that she wouldn’t have had with Miss Jessel, for instance, is
because of the particular attachment she developed for them in particular, rather
than a supposed right of all children. The thing that makes most clear the
Victorian equivalence is exactly that if Miss Jessel, had to pay for being sexual,
and could only cleanse herself with death - so did the children. We are shown
that with the death of our, “bad”, knowing boy Miles. The reason why Miss
Jessel isn’t “clean” now is because she refuses that punishment, she refuses
death - she “came back”. “I burst, as I had, the other time, made her burst, into
tears; she took me to her motherly breast, and my lamentation overflowed. “I
don’t do it!” I sobbed in despair; “I don’t save or shield them! It’s far worse than
I dreamed—they’re lost!”, they’re lost indeed, as the more she finds out, the
more perverse these ideal pictures of childhood innocence start to appear. The
pages where she discusses, as always with Mrs.Grose, Miles’s behavior with
Quint are striking, as they almost explicitly admit that some sort of sexualized
interaction has happened between them, which I imagine to be shocking for a
Victorian reader, particularly on the wake of Wilde’s trials. “What was it you had
in mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter from his
school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn’t pretend for him that he had
not literally ever been ‘bad’? He has not literally ‘ever,’ in these weeks that I
myself have lived with him and so closely watched him; he has been an
imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, loveable goodness”, this exaggeration
of Miles’s “lovable” qualities is juxtaposed with what is about to be revealed, “It
was a dreadfully austere inquiry, but levity was not our note, and, at any rate,
before the grey dawn admonished us to separate I had got my answer. What my
friend had had in mind proved to be immensely to the purpose. It was neither
more nor less than the circumstance that for a period of several months Quint
and the boy had been perpetually together. It was in fact the very appropriate
truth that she had ventured to criticise the propriety, to hint at the incongruity, of
so close an alliance, and even to go so far on the subject as a frank overture to
Miss Jessel”, that Miles and Quint, for months, were “perpetually together”,
who was considered quite inappropriate and improper. As I already said, Miles
spending time with Quint wasn’t supposed to be a problem according to the
uncle, which means that this so called alliance had to be a very, very close one,
which could be what made Mrs.Grose realize that Quint was fundamentally
“bad”, rather than the knowledge of Quint’s badness preceding Grose’s dislike
for having Miles spend too much time with him, even if she was suspicious of
him. She may have already construed him as a perverse figure, as a predator, as a
threat - his excessive familiarity with Miles was then a proof impossible to
challenge. He was bad. “Miss Jessel had, with a most strange manner, requested
her to mind her business, and the good woman had, on this, directly approached
little Miles”, Miss Jessel is not protrayed as a jealous lover - she encourages this
uncanny alliance between this “young gentleman”, this lovable child, and this
“base menial”, a depraved man. And that is because she is also construed as
depraved. As we’ve seen, she fits the contemporary model of the female co
offender, with all the ideas connected to it of intimate partner violence and
gender inequality that we posses today, but didn’t in the Victorian Era. This
“harlot governess”, as Myers called her[120], is an aberration of womanhood,
which was heavily tied with motherhood and the home in general in the
Victorian Era, she might not be seen as directly sexually interacting with the
children as Quint is in coded terms, but as I said, she has a nefarious sexual
influence on them - On Flora primarily, that she turns into a mini-her, into a little
aberrant woman as well, and also on Miles, by deciding not to intervene and stop
the relationship between him and Quint, which is gradually being revealed as not
being unwelcome on Miles’s part. Her refusal to invade Miles’s space, her
refusal to dictate for him the people he should spend time with in the already
restrictive house of Bly, her refusal to be like a “gaoler”, in the governess’s
words, makes her a terribly inadequate stand in for a mother (the role of the
governess being like that of a substitute mother), which, by Victorian standards,
made her an inadequate woman, as if her, most shocking of all, consensual,
relationship with lower class Quint wasn’t enough. In a sense, like Quint is the
uncle’s devilish double, Miss Jessel is the governess’s devilish double, even if,
by exploring the governess’s inner struggles as she isolated from the rest of the
world at Bly makes the most “Jessel” part of her come out, which undermines
the question of her as “angelic” double, while of the uncle we do not know
enough and his absolute normativity (not the liminal, weirdly non-normative
normativity of Miles) is never disproved. I believe that was the point in itself, the
“pedophile”, the “child predator” lives inside every normative adult in our
society. And even the most normative adult has a queer potential, when left
alone with children in a bizarre house in the English countryside for a prolonged
period of time. The absence of any patriarchal authority in the house of Bly,
except the dead Quint’s “bad” one, renders Bly not just the space of women and
children but also the space of queer women and children. Every character in the
novel except the uncle, so, except the person whose absence itself renders Bly
queer, every person who has been at Bly for prolonged periods of time, in a way
or another, is a queer figure, even in the sense of simply strange. “What she had
said to him, since I pressed, was that she liked to see young gentlemen not forget
their station. I pressed again, of course, at this. “You reminded him that Quint
was only a base menial?” “As you might say! And it was his answer, for one
thing, that was bad”, young gentlemen and base menials should not interact, that
seems to be the apparent meaning of this passage, and while class definitely
shapes the way Mrs.Grose views Quint and Miles’s familiarity, it is obvious,
what the passage actually seems to convey is that a man and a boy in general
should not interact so closely, but in particular, “young gentlemen” (already
projected in manhood and recognized as the, gendered, future of the nation, but,
contradictorily, possessing no rights - including the right to privacy, which he
will reclaim by assuming the role of a man, having already internalized that
privacy is not conceded to children, and the right to spend their time with
whomever they desire) and “base menials” (sexual threats shifting between
normative and non-normative views of masculinity), it is not a coincidence that
it is the governess asking if Mrs.Grose had reminded Miles’s of Quint’s social
status, as an attempt to prove his innocence in the face of emerging facts. The
question is supposed to imply, that Quint’s intelligence might have deceived
Miles, belied his real social status and made him believe that he might have been
a good “male role model” for him - And it is and was well known that lovable
boys would let their male role models do anything to them, and if they do not
have a father, it is not their fault, it’s in boys’s nature. Despite that she will
abandon the concept of Miles’s as innocent quite soon - even if progressive
sexologists would have tried to normalize and understand his conduct, but most
people’s, as I stressed, concept in the Victorian era of childhood innocence was
somehow frail, despite the spectacles that were made out of it, and sexology still
didn’t mostly shape the wider populations anchored prospectives. The issue is
that she wants, like us, to see perverse children. What else are we reading The
Turn for? And children are made all the more perverse when we have already
made numerous attempts to prove their innocence, all the more perverse when
we try to pretend they are not. “And for another thing?” I waited. “He repeated
your words to Quint?” “No, not that. It’s just what he wouldn’t!” she could still
impress upon me. “I was sure, at any rate,” she added, “that he didn’t. But he
denied certain occasions”, the reason why Miles, it is implied to be and
Mrs.Grose is implied to know, does not want to report to Quint the fact that he
has been reprimanded by her is that if Quint, knowing what there was a stake
when it came to his dangerous relationship with Miles, was informed of the fact
that suspicions had already arisen, he would have panicked and refused Miles
the contact that there previously was. We are slowly gaining a picture of a quite
complaisant Miles, which puts very much into question the idea that it “Quint’s
own fancy”, and which I can only imagine, appeared as quite startling to a
Victorian reader, even in a nonsexual perspective, the Victorian reader might
have been startled by a supposedly innocent child with a passion for this
undefined Evil encapsulated by Peter Quint. But not as much as our readers
would be. “What occasions?” “When they had been about together quite as if
Quint were his tutor—and a very grand one—and Miss Jessel only for the little
lady. When he had gone off with the fellow, I mean, and spent hours with him”,
one of the most explicit lines concerning Miles’s and Quint's relationship is this
one, the passage that definitively makes us readers ask ourselves “What went on
during those hours?”, when we ask ourselves this question we know we are
seeking more answers than simply “sex”, or “sexual abuse” as we would put it
today regardless of Miles’s consent, because at the core we know that already.
Our unspoken desire is for the details. And we imagine it. The Victorians
probably imagined it. The fact that we will never know is part of what makes it
so erotic - We can project all of our fantasies on their implied sexualized
interactions. The comparison between Quint and a tutor brings us to another
Henry James’s novel, for whom I will make a parenthesis right now, which was
published only a few years after The Turn Of The Screw, and that is, The Pupil
(1891), in which another relationship between a man and a boy, tutor and pupil,
shines out, that of Pemberton and Morgan. The relationship is construed as fairly
romantic, they exchange letters while they are separated and Pemberton
conserves them, and Pemberton owns a lock of Morgan’s hair, signifiers of
affection which Stockton makes us notice in her analysis, would mark them as
“potential future lovers” in an Austen novel.[121] The novel is a very interesting
work - Morgan is described as such in the beginning: “Morgan Moreen was,
somehow, sickly without being delicate, and that he looked intelligent (it is true
Pemberton wouldn’t have enjoyed his being stupid) only added to the suggestion
that, as with his big mouth and big ears he really couldn’t be called pretty, he
might be unpleasant”, Morgan is the only one of these three (him, Miles and
Dolcino) boy characters, that does not possess a striking physical beauty, on the
contrary, Pemberton’s first impression of him is that of an intelligent, unpleasant
(because of the fact that he is intelligent, but he also shouldn’t have been stupid
[!], and because of the fact that he is not pretty) if ugly boy, which defies the idea
of children as ornaments that is generally promoted when it comes to Miles’s
and Dolcino’s (that we will see later) physical description. Morgan will keep
appearing to us as the sort of child we love to hate, because he seems to know
more than we do, more than us adults do, more than Pemberton does. “One
would think you were my tutor!”, Pemberton exclaims. And he does not hide it.
His subversion of traditional norms of adult/child relationships is evident when
for example, he blurts out, about his older brother: “He tries to imitate me”, and
has his mother promptly replying “He tries? Why, he’s twenty years old!”, it is
boys who are supposed to imitate men, a man imitating a boy can only be
ridiculous, this idea reinforces the cultural idea that Morgan himself does not shy
away from in other occasions, that being a man is desirable, and that manhood is
something that every boy should aspire to, while boyhood is a “deficit form of
identity”[122]. The “pedophilia of everyday life”[123] is also hinted at in The
Pupil, mainly with the portrayal of the men who court Morgan’s highly guarded,
treated as commodities in this patriarchal system, older sisters but who also
“[…] were wonderfully amiable and ecstatic about Morgan. It was a genuine
tenderness, an artless admiration, equally strong in each. They even praised his
beauty, which was small […]”, praising children’s beauty was a norm in the
Victorian Era probably even more than it is in ours, and when from a man, was
generally also understood to be a way to get to the child’s mother or older female
relative’s heart, this attitude was satirized by J.M Barrie’s striking 1884
journalistic piece, “Pretty Boys”[124], which wouldn’t probably have been
written today, for how sexualized it is, unless it was a piece satirizing the
sexualized, generally female (As we’ve seen, but not always, more explicitly
right wing moral panics over male children assuming the traits of sexualized
adult women are present when looking at boys like “Desmond Is Amazing”[125]
expressing themselves) child, in some ways, “Pretty Boys” resembles those sort
of pieces but is uniquely Victorian in the rage that’s expressed towards the
hypothetical boy himself as well as in a quite misogynist manner, towards his
mother and just mothers in general (it is very sexist piece), echoing the
complaints that were often made of the “Little Lord Fauntleroy” style, in fact
this icon of childhood innocence had become increasingly sinister, and at least
for boys, but now we see it with girls as well in sexualization discourse we are
discussing, “natural” childhood, with its naughtiness became more “angelic”
than stereotypical angelic childhood, which assumed a fetishistic character. It
would be possible to analyze this piece by invoking the fact that his anger was
probably due to the fact that he found himself troubled by the sexual feelings
that these boys used to rise in him, as despite claims from some people in his life
that he never had an erection over anyone[126], the evidence points to the fact that
he did have a fixation for prepubescent boys[127], a fixation similar to Lewis
Carroll’s (in fact the two are often regarded as parallels) fixation towards
prepubescent girls.[128] Ironically, and this confirms that idea, his main fixation
was a boy named Michael, who was very similar to the pretty boys he scorned in
his much earlier piece, a boy who was son of a mother, with whom he was
fixated as well on its own right, who was said to wear her children like
“jewels”[129], exactly like the mothers he thunders against in “Pretty Boys”. But
that shouldn’t obscure the fact that the article brings light to this broader social
pattern - in which yes, pedophilia was and is a deviance, but there is a lot of
social capita placed on the beauty of children, and it is even used as a way to
establish normative adult heterosexual contacts. Which reconfirms the fact that
“pedophilia”, defined broadly, its culture is normalized when it doesn’t lead to
sexual contact, the characteristic that defines a pedophile is that he is someone
who has sex with children, this is why “pedophile” is never used to simply mean
someone who is sexually attracted to children, he also has to have initiated
sexual contact or at least have possessed child pornography, given in a way a
physical manifestation of this desire. He has to have done these things - because
if he doesn’t, he is disturbingly similar to us. He is us. The first thing Pemberton
notices - like the governess - of Morgan, is his physical looks, and he
characterizes him as probably unpleasant when he notices that he isn’t beautiful.
Pemberton, unlike the governess, doesn't even have the defense that he is a
woman - generally women, even today, are given much more license to goad
about the beauty and “cuteness” of children, we could take for example how
today, where pedophilia has also began to be understood as a crime heavily tied
with the Internet, which is a site where children can reclaim a personal space
without adult intrusion, as for this generation, they tend to know more about it
than adults, which is intolerable for most adults, as it reverses for probably the
first time in their lives the supremacy of adults over children, and of course
generates panic, The Child On The Internet is one of the greatest moral panics of
our times, a woman that leaves appreciative comments under “cute” pictures of
children does not come under scrutiny while a man probably will. But he doesn’t
have to defend himself, because beauty or better “cuteness” is seen as something
children owe adults, as something children, alongside their “innocence”, owe
adults to make up for the fact that for the rest, they are seen as empty, emptyness
is one of the defining characteristic of the social construction of “childhood”[130].
Well, Morgan is neither pretty nor innocent. Big deal. And yet, Pemberton can’t
help but be fascinated. It isn’t just those gentlemen who “[…] called him a little
angel and a little prodigy, and pitied his want of health effusively”, Pemberton as
well “ […] feared at first that their extravagance would make him hate the boy,
but before this happened he had become extravagant himself”. Some of the
conversations between Pemberton and Morgan echo some of the conversations
in the last part of the novel that take place between Miles and his tutor, the
governess. But while Miles rather seems angry and deceitful, Morgan seems
genuine. It is, I believe, because Pemberton isn’t nearly the “gaoler” the
governess is, he relates to Morgan like an human being, while the governess
struggles to do so with Miles, it is also true, that he does, because Morgan proves
to him that he is somehow superior to other children, and not as a general
positive regard Pemberton has for children as a class. “Morgan said suddenly to
his companion: “Do you like it - you know, being with us all in this intimate
way?” “My dear fellow, why should I stay if I didn’t?””, he calls him “dear”,
like the governess does with Miles, and like he does with her (While on the
contrary Morgan never calls Pemberton “dear” in his own right, for gendered
reasons), and the answers about staying sound almost like they were taken from
the conversation in The Turn Of The Screw. Another romantic indicator of their
relationship is their blushing while talking to each other, “For a particular
reason the words made Pemberton change colour. The boy noticed in an instant
that he had turned red, whereupon he turned red himself, and the pupil and the
master exchanged a longish glance, in which there was a consciousness of many
more things than are usually touched upon, even tacitly, in such a relation”. And
yet, despite the normalization of this man/boy romanticism, Pemberton does
realistically experience the worries of men when they have a close friendship
with a child, or even of when they simply work with children, the care of
children was generally constructed as women's work, and generally it was girls
(and younger boys), when they were educated, who were educated at home, boys
of Morgan’s age went to school, but Morgan is sick, which inherently excludes
him from that space (And Miles was banished from it, but he is eager to go back,
proving, despite the governess’s implied belief, that he was not sexually preyed
upon, or at least, that he wouldn’t let that complicate his relation to that space),
and it still is, the conception that men who work with children are not to be
trusted (Unless they are teachers of middle school or high school, coaches, Boy
Scout leaders ect, who are conceived as “good role models” for boys and their
sexual predation is often hidden or understated), far from being “misandry”, is a
form of social control to reinforce gender roles. Pemberton has thoughts like:
“He used sometimes to wonder what people would think they were - fancy they
were looked askance at, as if it might be a suspected case of kidnapping”. As
Stockton notices, sometimes their relationship sounds more like a relationship
between an husband and a wife[131], particularly when they are plotting to go
away to live together, alone. And even then, Morgan does not want the
traditional role of a wife: “We ought to go off and live somewhere together”,
said the young man. “I’ll go like a shot if you’ll take me”. “I’d get some work
that would keep us both afloat”, Pemberton continued. “So would I. Why
shouldn’t I work? I ain’t such a crétin!”. Morgan fights for the right to go live
with whomever he wants, to choose his own company instead of necessarily
having to remain as the virtual property of a family that he did not choose,
simply because it is his biological family. It is subversive for children, as we’ve
seen, to choose their own company, and much more to decide to abandon their
family before they attained adulthood. But Morgan himself, having internalized
the societal disdain for children and their capability also conflates (male)
adulthood with independence: “He considered that the situation would change -
that, in short, he would be “finished”, “grown up”, producible in the world of
affairs, and ready to prove himself of sterling ability”. He mentions a better
future where he “ […] shall turn into a man”, and “ […] take their affairs in
hand, I'll marry my sisters”. But we shall never see him become a man - he was
too rebellious a boy to deserve to become a man - a fate he shares with Miles
and Dolcino. Exactly when it seemed that he had won, his parents would let him
go live alone with his Pemberton, he succumbs. “Do you mean that he may take
me to live with him for ever and ever?” cried the boy. “Away, away, anywhere he
likes?”, but then, “He had turned very white and had raised his hand to his left
side. They were all three looking at him, but Mrs. Moreen was the first to bound
forward. “Ah, his darling little heart!”, she broke out ; and this time, on her
knees before him and without respect for the idol, “You walked him too far, you
hurried him too fast!” she tossed over her shoulders at Pemberton”,
“Pemberton saw, with equal horror, by Morgan’s own stricken face, that he was
gone”. “Too clever to live”, indeed. This, as Stockton says[132], could also be
interpreted as a “pétit mort”, that is, an orgasm, she tells us, “Does Henry James
want us to wonder: Is there a form to hold boyish joy (here, quite dramatically, a
violent joy) at the thought of being given, by one’s parents, to a man?”[133]
(From Father to To Mentor?), I chose a different mode of analysis, privileging
the idea that a child should be punished with death for possessing knowledge,
because it resonates with Dolcino and Miles’s character as well.
Now, that we’ve seen why the comparison between Quint and a tutor is
suggestive, if Henry James was already thinking about Morgan and Pemberton,
let’s go back to The Turn Of The Screw.
Her comment on how Miss Jessel was only “for the little lady” does not prove
that they also had panic about Miss Jessel spending time with Flora when she
was alive, and not just because that was her role, because as we’ve seen it is
implied that was Quint’s also, but only serves to enhance the inappropriateness
of Miles and Quint’s closeness, because Miss Jessel also had to spend some time
with Miles as her tutor, the fact that she did not because he was so constantly
with Quint is understood to add another shade of impropriety to their
relationship. “He then prevaricated about it—he said he hadn’t?” Her assent
was clear enough to cause me to add in a moment: “I see. He lied”, Miles’s lies
concerning his contact with Quint would today be understood in the paradigm of
CSA, “don’t tell anyone!”, he would be seen as having been coerced by Quint
into hiding the fact that they were interacting, which would be seen as suspicious
even if no sexual contact was actually taking place, as it is considered part of the
so called “grooming process”. But neither Mrs.Grose’s nor the governess seem
to look at Miles’s denial of “certain occasions” in this paradigm. Miles is seen as
to blame for his lies. And maybe they are right to see it this way. He, knowing
that Mrs.Grose would have put a stop to his relationship with Quint if he was to
tell her of “certain occasions”, and he did not want that. So he lied and did what
he wanted. At the time, as we’ve seen, the idea that a child who lies to adults to
foster a (implied to be sexual) connection with a man might be doing so for
other, non-sexual reasons (the need for affection, the need for a father figure,
etc), wasn’t widespread in the wider population, only some progressive
sexologists began developing these ideas, and they did not apply them to all
children, Havelock Ellis in a case study from Sexual Inversion, tells us: “Guy
Olmstead began to show signs of sexual perversity at the age of 12. He was
seduced (we are led to believe) by a man who occupied the same bedroom”,[134]
this subject not only was perverse since he was twelve, but is seen as probably
lying when he claims that he was “seduced” (In this case meaning, was
manipulated and not fully agentive). But we already saw how “inverted”
children were denied sexual innocence unanimously, even by the same
characters who used to defend the innocence of children as a broader social
category. But, surprisingly, even children who are not described as being a
“deviant” or “perverse” type of children, are in some sparse affirmations painted
as fully agentive and desiring, when nothing else can be done (we have seen that
in legal thought that was the general discourse for girls, even when they were
probably assaulted, and Miles’s case would have puzzled them to no end, as
there was no question of dismissing the charge by claiming that he tried to extort
money from Quint, and even no question of painting Quint as the debauched
upperclass corrupting the children of working class men, another dominant
discourse when children were not victim blamed[135], so, even if there are no
clear cut indication indications of him being an “invert”, only hints which would
not have been satisfactory enough, more complex discourses about sexual
agency would have arisen) in sexological writings, even if that wasn’t the
prevalent idea among these innovators. Even more surprisingly, it is exactly in
Krafft-Ebing’s study of “paedophilia erotica”, which founded the idea of
“pedophiles” as a deviant category of men with a pathological attraction to
prepubescents (and who fail to conform to expectations of “normal” masculinity
with women [also tied with marriage, reproductivity, and an ability to provide
for a wife and children in the Victorian era[136], because prepubescents and boys
cannot reproduce, the pedophile is deemed deviant, but generally an attraction
towards girls who can give birth, no matter how young, was hardly stigmatized,
only began to be so towards the end of the Victorian era, and even then remained
very common as I’ve said, because of sexual mores who have usually centered
the idea of sex for the sake of reproductivity, this is why historically sometimes
the vaginal rape of prepubescent girls was seen as sodomy[137], and are frustrated
by this, this frustration possibly being at the root of their pathology itself, a
discourse we see echoed today as well as we’ve seen), that we see one of those
sparse affirmations, in the description of one of his subjects, whom he reckons
was not born “paedophilic”, he became so: “Only at the age of twenty-two, when
a boy twelve years old forced sexual intercourse upon him, he became
pedophilic. At that time he refused his seducer, but soon he could resist no longer
the desire awakened in him by that incident”[138]. Not only, unlike “Guy
Olmstead”, this subject is not doubted “we are led to believe”, when he claims
he had been unwilling or at least “seduced”, but the child is blamed for having
perverted this previously non-pedophilic man, while we are usually used to see
the reverse narrative. Krafft-Ebing even invites us to have pity for him: “His life
was blighted by this unfortunate weakness, and he made several attempts at
suicide”[139]. What is even more striking, is that, unlike Olmstead as a child, to
this boy no special characteristics are ascribed to, he is simply “a boy”. Krafft-
Ebing doesn’t comment on the unusual quality of this child’s supposed sexual
aggression upon a man. This cannot simply be one of those normalizing
discourses about boys and men that I’ve mentioned before, because as I hinted at
even when the boy is portrayed as receptive ie.not wholly resistant, and even
somehow complaisant he is never portrayed as agentive when he is not also
painted as a special, “deviant” category of child (An “invert”), he cannot be
simply “seeking a male role model”, boys that are seeking a male role model in
these discourses at least allow men to rape them, they do not rape men. Not in
the Victorian era at least, this open aggression might have substantiated some
non-sexual explanations in the year we are living (but the man would have not
been believed in the first place), but never ones by a Victorian, even the most
progressive one. The aggression is not even explained by the boy possessing a
privilege that would set him upon a man, his social class is not specified. But
maybe lying, which is what Miles is supposed to have done here, could have still
be justified by those discourses, and yet, the governess, and most people, would
not hear anything of it. They also stress again how much Miss Jessel did not
seem to care: “Oh!” Mrs. Grose mumbled. This was a suggestion that it didn’t
matter; which indeed she backed up by a further remark. “You see, after all,
Miss Jessel didn’t mind. She didn’t forbid him”, the governess does know Miss
Jessel and Quint were lovers, the implication that Miss Jessel should have
minded not only reflects on the issue of the fact that she was in charge of him,
and should have “protected” him, but mainly on the fact that as his lover, she
should have felt that her place was being usurped. Then the governess goes on to
inquire about the degree of knowledge Miles had of Quint’s relationship with
Jessel and wether he had helped covering it up or no, in this context, Quint’s
sexual transgressions are melded together, all under the concept of
“impropriety”, not differentiating much between an upper class child and an
upper class woman as sexual object choice. In the Victorian era the idea of the
sexual assault of children being particularly heinous was just starting to develop,
and contradictory ideas coexisted, this is one of the main points of this article.
As we’ve seen there is often a conflation between his behavior with Jessel and
his behavior with Miles - but also, the corruption of children has much more
significance in the novel even if it presupposes that children and women, at least
“good” women, possess similar degrees of innocence and Miss Jessel’s agency is
not unproblematic but somehow more easily accepted than that of the children.
“I doubt if I looked as queer as you!” she retorted with homely force. “And if he
was so bad then as that comes to, how is he such an angel now?”“Yes, indeed—
and if he was a fiend at school! How, how, how? Well,” I said in my torment,
“you must put it to me again, but I shall not be able to tell you for some days.
Only, put it to me again!” I cried in a way that made my friend stare. “There are
directions in which I must not for the present let myself go.” Meanwhile I
returned to her first example—the one to which she had just previously referred
—of the boy’s happy capacity for an occasional slip”, they cannot comprehend
the fact that childhood purity may well be just a performance, and that a child
might perform “pureness” to gain the approval of the adults in their life, or to
simply survive in a society that demands “purity” of children, but the “purity” of
Miles is dangling on a string right now, “If Quint—on your remonstrance at the
time you speak of— was a base menial, one of the things Miles said to you, I find
myself guessing, was that you were another.” Again her admission was so
adequate that I continued: “And you forgave him that?””, Miles has understood
that Mrs. Grose reminding him of Quint being a “base menial” was an attempt to
construe him as a sexual threat to him, so he remarked to her that she was too,
and no one had ever portrayed her as a threat to him, no one had tried to forbid
him to spend time with her. He himself highlighted how, yes, class does very
much influenced the perception of Quint as a sexual(ized) threat, but it is also
influenced by other factors, like gender and how close the relationship itself was
written to be by Henry James, the novel is trying to tell us that it is true that
Mrs.Grose had a prejudice towards Peter Quint, but that something untoward
between Miles and Quint really went on. The governess asks her if she has
forgiven him, implying that she should have not, thereby questioning his
fundamental innocence, again. He is seen as having been a disrespectful child,
defying the authority of an adult, even if in the broader context he should have
been considered a victim. But exactly like before, his status is unstable.
Mrs.Grose answers that she certainly did, and that she is surprised that the
governess wouldn’t, which makes the governess panic, because Mrs.Grose
questioned her perception of herself as defender of the children: “Wouldn’t
you?”, “Oh, yes!” And we exchanged there, in the stillness, a sound of the
oddest amusement”. She made the governess realize that she had openly doubted
childhood innocence. There is “amusement” in that, apparently. “Then I went on:
“At all events, while he was with the man—” “Miss Flora was with the woman.
It suited them all!” It suited me, too, I felt, only too well; by which I mean that it
suited exactly the particularly deadly view I was in the very act of forbidding
myself to entertain”, it suited her too, she tells us. She “forbids herself” to
entertain this “deadly view” because she knows the dangers of it, the dangers of
visualizing sexual children. And yet she will keep doing it, until the end.“His
having lied and been impudent are, I confess, less engaging specimens than I
had hoped to have from you of the outbreak in him of the little natural man.
Still,” I mused, “they must do, for they make me feel more than ever that I must
watch”, he lied, and he was impudent, it was his fault the governess tells us, her
belief in the innocence of childhood diminishes every day more she spends at
Bly, she is starting to have to reckon with something unprecedented - the
humanity of children. But she says that she doesn’t accept these informations in
a wholly negative way, on the contrary they encourage her to “watch” - And we
know how much she enjoys watching children. “It made me blush, the next
minute, to see in my friend’s face how much more unreservedly she had forgiven
him than her anecdote struck me as presenting to my own tenderness an
occasion for doing. This came out when, at the schoolroom door, she quitted
me”, it makes her blush to know that Mrs.Grose, who before had somehow, in
her eyes, doubted Flora’s innocence, had forgiven Miles for a behavior that
despite her denial before of not being able to forgive him, she cannot make peace
with as it wrestles with her ideas of universal childhood innocence. She is
starting to gradually realize that the children have something perverse in
themselves. Miles is the “accused”, for example, not Quint, a relationship like
that conceptualized also by Grose as something Miles would have been “accused
of”, like a “sodomite” in the nineteenth century British courts.“Surely you don’t
accuse him—” “Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me? Ah,
remember that, until further evidence, I now accuse nobody”, and as we know,
without proofs of “intercourse”, she admits, no one can be convicted. But she
doesn’t regard him as the same, she doesn’t regard all children in the same way
she used to do. She is getting acquainted, like Victorian readers would be, like
we do while reading The Turn to this day, with the humanity of children as I said
- that she reads as perversity, whose thought she loathes but also seems to be
endlessly fascinated by. When she sees Quint again she thinks: ”He knew me as
well as I knew him; and so, in the cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high
glass and another on the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each other in
our common intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion, a living, detestable,
dangerous presence”, but she is stricken by how normal, though horrifying, the
situation is: “I felt, in a fierce rigour of confidence, that if I stood my ground a
minute I should cease—for the time, at least—to have him to reckon with; and
during the minute, accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real
interview: hideous just because it was human, as human as to have met alone, in
the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer, some
criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close quarters that
gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural”, a lot of,
often erotophobic, discourse centers the “normalization” of pedophilia, but
pedophilia has been already normalized in the sense that not a day passes
without us hearing of it, which situates it as a normal part of life, it’s the fact that
pedophilia exists and that we must constantly protect our children from it,
because it is everywhere, except in us - and that the pedophile himself has been
recast as the normative white man[140] since a while now, despite it's non-
normative spins such as the female pedophile and the child pedophile, that
makes it in our eyes so dangerous, the famous “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, the
knowledge that we cannot identify a pedophile terrifies us but also encourages
even more surveillance, “hideous just because it was human” (just as the
children are), Quint is cast as Other by the appellatives of “enemy, adventurer,
criminal”, but the horror is huge because it only has “one note” of the
“unnatural” (the significance of this “unnatural” as we’ve already seen, that is
used to refer to the issues surrounding Miles and Quint in particular, could not
have escaped the Victorian reader consider the time period where The Turn
appeared).“If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an hour, we still
at least would have spoken”, indeed, we believe pedophiles are worse than
murderers, because often we advocate for the death of pedophiles, and also,
because often we justify adults who kill (bad) children. But the governess is
nevertheless captivated by erotic children, particularly when they behave badly,
terribly, and put her, the adult (!) in her place: "She stood there in so much of her
candour and so little of her nightgown, with her pink bare feet and the golden
glow of her curls”, and she also: “She looked intensely grave, and I had never
had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrill of which had just
been so prodigious) as on my consciousness that she addressed me with a
reproach. “You naughty: where have you been?”— instead of challenging her
own irregularity I found myself arraigned and explaining”, Flora here assumes
the role of the adult, and the governess that of the “naughty” child in need of a
spanking - she calls her “naughty”, a word generally associated with children,
naughtiness being the only badness who is permitted to children, who is even
indispensable for the construction of a normal child, because if all children are
naughty all children deserve to be punished, the governess should be humiliated
that instead of scolding Flora, “challenging her own irregularity”, she is the one
who has to explain herself apologetically, lest Flora decides to put her over her
knee. The position of being the one who needs to explain herself is foreign to the
governess as an adult in relation to a child - it might not be so for her as a
woman in relation to a man - but Flora is the “perfect”, pretty eight year old girl
she is in charge of. “You were looking for me out of the window?” I said. “You
thought I might be walking in the grounds?” “Well, you know, I thought someone
was”—she never blanched as she smiled out that at me. Oh, how I looked at her
now! “And did you see anyone?” “Ah, no!” she returned, almost with the full
privilege of childish inconsequence, resentfully, though with a long sweetness in
her little drawl of the negative”, they are actually hinting to the fact that Miles is
out there, doing “bad” things, like in one of the pivotal points of the novel as we
will soon see, and Flora is protecting him by claiming that she saw no one.
Using her childishness, something that is imposed upon her, as a weapon to
manipulate an adult and protect her brother’s (and her) connection with the
ghosts, she is fostering an alliance between children (that does perplex her
because Flora is according to her inferior in “age, sex and intelligence”) devoted
to the resistance to adult control and power. “One of these, for a moment,
tempted me with such singular intensity that, to withstand it, I must have gripped
my little girl with a spasm that, wonderfully, she submitted to without a cry or a
sign of fright. Why not break out at her on the spot and have it all over?—give it
to her straight in her lovely little lighted face? “You see, you see, you know that
you do and that you already quite suspect I believe it; therefore, why not frankly
confess it to me, so that we may at least live with it together and learn perhaps,
in the strangeness of our fate, where we are and what it means?”, her “lovely
little lighted face” is to the governess, inseparable from her behavior that is
frustrating her endlessly, it both enchants her and makes her rage. "Flora
luminously considered; after which, with her little divine smile: “Because I don’t
like to frighten you!” “But if I had, by your idea, gone out—?” She absolutely
declined to be puzzled; she turned her eyes to the flame of the candle as if the
question were as irrelevant, or at any rate as impersonal, as Mrs. Marcet or
nine-times-nine. “Oh, but you know,” she quite adequately answered, “that you
might come back, you dear, and that you have!”, Flora is calm, unbothered by
the governess’s attempts to entrap her, talks to her condescendingly, “as if the
question was irrelevant”, which is often the way adults address children, making
her feel like she is the child in relation to an adult, who is in need to be lectured,
and whose questions are a burden to answer because of how obvious they are
“Oh, but you know”, and the word “dear”, which is often used by adults when
talking to children rather than the other way around - or by men when talking to
women - is spoken by the children, Miles will use it extensively, or better spit at,
as if it was an insult, to her, even if she will classify it as being a mark of
“respect” later, but only because as we will see, of how much she is caught up by
the sensuality of the children, how much her authority is undermined and how
Miles is at that point “playing the man”. “And after a little, when she had got
into bed, I had, for a long time, by almost sitting on her for the retention of her
hand, to show how I recognised the pertinence of my return”, she had to satisfy
her, after all. Now we will concentrate ourselves on what I called a pivotal
moment in the novel - the moment where she finds Miles outside, being very,
very bad and the moment that marks the beginning of the governess’s and Miles
more explicit flirtation. Now, I already mentioned how the tower is generally
understood as a phallic symbolism, this analysis is not Freudian in nature, but it
doesn’t need to be so to recognize this fact, which is also confirmed by Miss
Jessel’s tie to the lake. The governess discovers something one of these nights:
“Then I saw something more. The moon made the night extraordinarily
penetrable and showed me on the lawn a person, diminished by distance, who
stood there motionless and as if fascinated, looking up to where I had appeared
—looking, that is, not so much straight at me as at something that was
apparently above me. There was clearly another person above me— there was a
person on the tower; but the presence on the lawn was not in the least what I had
conceived and had confidently hurried to meet”, there is someone on the lawn,
who, “as if fascinated” is looking up at a presence on the tower “above her”, this
sounds almost the description of a prayer, this “someone” is described as
enchanted, could be ecstatic, and looking up to a mysterious presence who rises
above everyone else on the tower, like a God, where she was supposedly
daydreaming of the uncle before realizing that man wasn’t him in one of the first
scenes of the novel and the one most often quoted when the tower as a sexual
symbolism is discussed, in fact this scene is probably thought to be much more
unsettling, because: “The presence on the lawn—I felt sick as I made it out—was
poor little Miles himself”. This scene is the inspiration behind the more
explicitly eroticized “At Night” of Britten’s opera, that we will analyze in detail
in the section dedicated to it, as Quint is described as standing on the tower [141]
while he sings his aria. We also see it represented in Oates’s short story.[142] Of
course there have been readings of it, in Wagenknecht’s psychoanalytic reading
of the novel he notes: “The idea of homosexuality, at least for Miles, is more
difficult to set aside. The chapter ends with an implied vision of Miles gazing
devotedly at Peter Quint on the tower (a gaze hitherto associated with the
hetero-sexual attraction of the governess to the Master)”.[143] But as I said, the
reading doesn’t need to be primarily psychoanalytic, Sandra Dinter’s isn’t, and
this is her reading of the scene: “In both cases, the tower functions as a classic
phallic symbolism that represents Quint’s power over the inhabitants of Bly,
particularly females and the child with whom he probably had a pedophilic
relationship”[144]. Generally, in those readings, this is represented as oppressive,
but it isn’t so simple. This action makes Miles feel powerful, from now on he
will start speaking to the governess with confidence, and will start to, in a way,
seduce her - but without placing the focus on his sexual desire, which could even
be argued to not exist, but on hers. Desires that she, like all adults, sublimated.
He takes her acceptable adoration and idealization of childhood, that was
becoming increasingly problematic anyhow, and shows everybody it’s
pedophilic nature. He doesn’t queer her, she was since she came to Bly, he just
shows everyone this embarrassing queerness. This allows him to wield power
over her - without ever being blamed, thanks to the same concept that is used to
oppress him - that of childhood and its correlates to innocence and purity. “As
soon as I appeared in the moonlight on the terrace, he had come to me as
straight as possible; on which I had taken his hand without a word and led him,
through the dark spaces, up the staircase where Quint had so hungrily hovered
for him, along the lobby where I had listened and trembled, and so to his
forsaken room”, them going into his room - where a quite eroticized and charged
with meanings interaction will take place between the two, passing “up the
staircase where Quint had so hungrily hovered for him”, is to me, aligning the
governess and Quint, portraying them as similar in their desire towards Miles,
something I’ve already hinted at, a desire which is even more deviant from her
than from Quint as it masculinizes her (Some analyses might even try to argue
that Peter Quint is a figure made up by the governess as a mean to attempt the
realization of her pedophilic desires in the fullest - her [missing] phallus), Quint
“hungrily hovering” for Miles, as Kevin Ohi says, “evokes a sexualized
yearning”[145]. It is amusing to note that the first edition I ever possessed of The
Turn as a girl was in Italian, my native language, and translated “hungrily
hovered” as “famelicamente insidiato”, “insidiare” in Italian being mainly a way
to refer to the, largely unwanted and persistent, attempted sexual seduction of a
woman by a man[146], other translations of “hungrily hovered” in Italian being
even more sexualized that the line Henry James wrote, like “famelico, a caccia
di lui”, I remember the distinct feeling of being struck by this perverse ghostly
pedophilic eroticism. But the line constructs Miles again as a victim of Quint’s
(the governess doesn’t realize that would imply of hers too, because she still
doesn’t fully understand how she is going to have her darkest desires exposed),
lust, which again charges the action he committed with a revolutionary meaning
- the ghost doesn’t just “hungrily hover” for him as the governess supposes,
Miles wants to see him as well, “Heaven forbid! The man” has never been under
this much questioning. That what Miles was doing on the lawn is construed as
somehow sexual is obvious, she feels “sick”, disgusted, realizing that it is Miles
who is worshipping the figure on the tower, and the way the event is perceived
by her goes far beyond a normal reaction to an act of boyish disobedience like
being outside when he should have been in his bed, “Not a sound, on the way,
had passed between us, and I had wondered—oh, how I had wondered!—if he
were groping about in his little mind for something plausible and not too
grotesque. It would tax his invention, certainly, and I felt, this time, over his real
embarrassment, a curious thrill of triumph. It was a sharp trap for the
inscrutable! He couldn’t play any longer at innocence; so how the deuce would
he get out of it?”, she is curious to see how he will justify this act, she feels
“triumphant” (but that won’t be for long) because she has caught the innocent
child doing something not at all innocent, something unjustifiable. That because
he was simply outside, looking up to the tower, he is now not innocent anymore
seems absurd, but not if we contextualize it as an explicitly sexual metaphor. In
his room, this very important as I said, interaction takes place. “You must tell me
now—and all the truth. What did you go out for? What were you doing there?” I
can still see his wonderful smile, the whites of his beautiful eyes, and the
uncovering of his little teeth shine to me in the dusk. “If I tell you why, will you
understand?”, Miles knows that the governess does not understand his bond
with Quint, just as Mrs.Grose did not understand it when Quint was alive, and
Miles used to similarly disobey her and spend those famous mysterious hours
with him. And that she could never. As an adult, Miles’s most intimate feelings
are unaccessible to her, she cannot understand them anymore in the stage she is,
it doesn’t matter how hard she tries. The complexities of his relationship with
Quint could never be fully represented in the governess’s mind. And maybe by
ours as well. My first sexual feelings are just a faint memory to me, although I
remember their intensity and their difference from the ones I had as an older
adolescent and adult. When it comes to issues of power, it may be appropriate to
redirect for a second time to Houlbrook’s idea of danger and possibility[147]. “My
heart, at this, leaped into my mouth. Would he tell me why? I found no sound on
my lips to press it, and I was aware of replying only with a vague, repeated,
grimacing nod. He was gentleness itself, and while I wagged my head at him he
stood there more than ever a little fairy prince. It was his brightness indeed that
gave me a respite. Would it be so great if he were really going to tell me?”, the
governess knows why, her reaction itself tells us that she does know why, but she
keeps pressing for the details, as usual. Her desire to invade the most intimate
aspects of his thoughts and feelings (as she is doing by asking the detailed
explanation for his action) reveals to us her own prurient interests that she can
pursue while still portraying herself as righteous as we do today, even if we
would never have already abandoned the belief in Miles’s innocence, in
addiction to the physical description of the stereotypical “pretty child”. Miles
answers to her something important, something that defines in my theory of the
book, the whole novel: “Well,” he said at last, “just exactly in order that you
should do this.” “Do what?” “Think me—for a change—bad!”, Miles wants to
be thought bad because to be thought bad, and real-bad not boy-bad, is to be
recognized as fully human. The act of deciding out of his own volition to assume
what is generally thought of as a passive position confuses ideas of normativity
and deviance, he “looks up” like boys look up to men in normative discourse,
but at the same time he is starting to appear to us, thanks to the influence, despite
herself, of the governess as well, as a perversely desiring queer and definitely
sexual child exactly because of his agency and defiance. He takes power in this
liminal position, where the boundaries between normativity and non normativity,
between comprehensible and unforgivable are blurred. We can say he felt most
empowered under the tower, as much as to do this: “Think me—for a change
—bad!” 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”, that reclamation of
his sexuality under the tower makes him feel sure of himself enough to exercise
sexual(ized) behaviors without fear, to take the initiative and kiss the governess,
which she welcomes, she even desires to cry from the emotion. This strips her of
adult authority, she is letting this perverse child corrupt her, “Are you afraid he’ll
corrupt you?”, Mrs.Grose had once told her talking ad absurdum, and it's
happening. It might even be something similar to Miss Jessel’s and Flora's
interaction, only even more sexualized (What to do about it? There are few men
at Bly), the governess is the “innocent” “girl” and Miles is the perverse
(feminized) influence trying to lure her, this is dangerous exactly because the
governess’s desire, always negated and sublimated, for him makes her an
excellent target to her regression from authoritative guardian to a bad little girl
who plays with other bad little children. He reclaims “badness”, as something to
boast about, something to be proud of, and what sets it apart from “normal”
boyish naughtiness as I’ve hinted at, the one Mrs.Grose thinks essential for
children, is exactly the sexual quality of said “badness”, like at the school. “And
when did you go down?” “At midnight. When I’m bad I am bad!” and “He
literally bloomed so from this exploit that he could afford radiantly to assent.
“How otherwise should I have been bad enough?”, those do not seem to be the
words of an evil or demonic child even if he is constructed as such, but of a
defiant child, who is extremely tired of the concept of ideal childhood he had to
perfectly perform until very recently in his life. But having internalized it, he can
as I said, use it at his advantage. This is why the governess again embraces this
very “bad” boy: "Then, after another embrace, the incident and our interview
closed on my recognition of all the reserves of goodness that, for his joke, he had
been able to draw upon”. “I reinforced it with the mention of still another
remark that he had made before we separated. “It all lies in half-a-dozen
words,” I said to her, “words that really settle the matter. ‘Think, you know, what
I might do!’ He threw that off to show me how good he is. He knows down to the
ground what he ‘might’ do. That’s what he gave them a taste of at school”, Miles
understands the governess knows perfectly of his sexual behaviors, “you know,
what I might do” he said, she herself remarks that "what he might do” is what
“he gave them at taste of at school” (!), this renders it evident. As we’ve seen the
whole narration is built on the fear of child sexuality, because it all centers
Miles’s expulsion, it is the principal event of the novel, and it will culminate in
the final scene, where it will become clear. “Lord, you do change!” cried my
friend.“I don’t change—I simply make it out”, Mrs.Grose remarks that the
governess has changed in regard towards the children, towards children, because
she has lost the belief that childhood innocence is universal and unquestionable -
the process of learning that some children are perverse to her is a natural
process, the consequence of beginning to understand what’s really going on at
Bly. “I don’t change—I simply make it out. The four, depend upon it, perpetually
meet. If on either of these last nights you had been with either child, you would
clearly have understood. The more I’ve watched and waited the more I’ve felt
that if there were nothing else to make it sure it would be made so by the
systematic silence of each. Never, by a slip of the tongue, have they so much as
alluded to either of their old friends, any more than Miles has alluded to his
expulsion”, the children depend on the ghosts because their sexualization is
inseparable from their interaction with Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, even if in
different ways, and for Miles, also with his experiences at school. As we know
today, the moment that a child’s connection with a pedophile, or with sexuality
in general, is talked about is the moment when it is violently broken off. This is
why silence is construed as so important in the children’s interaction with the
ghosts or with Miles’s behavior at school. But in her desire to make the children
talk, like sometimes in ours, the governess “becomes” a pedophile herself, even
if she at least latently was since the first time she had set her gaze on them,
because it is not needed. She, as Miles had told her “you know”, perfectly knows
what went on and what’s going on, while it’s true that without “further evidence”
she cannot accuse anyone (in that line, she was talking about accusing Miles) of
“carrying on an intercourse” that is concealed from her, it is also true that simply
observing the children will provide all of the evidence needed, and that the
evidence she has should be enough to remove most of the mystery. She now sees
(sexualized) Evil with a capital E in every behavior of theirs, like when today
every behavior from a child could be constructed as a sign of abuse, except that
the here they are perceived as just as guilty :”He’s not reading to her,” I
declared; “they’re talking of them—they’re talking horrors!”. She knows she
could pass as crazy, but she is convinced that fortunately she is not: “I go on, I
know, as if I were crazy; and it’s a wonder I’m not”. Then she speaks one of the
most significant lines of this second part: “Why, of the very things that have
delighted, 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!”. She now knows,
thanks to the children’s behavior, that childhood is a performance, “a policy and
a fraud”. Their “more than earthly beauty” and “unnatural goodness” had
“delighted” and “fascinated” her but also “mystified” and “troubled” her not just
because she found herself uncomfortably aroused by them, but also because their
absolute perfection, their lack of naturalness, belied their performativity. So, it is
actually from the first moment she saw them that we knew, and that she at the
core knew, that something went deeply wrong at Bly. “As yet mere lovely babies?
Yes, mad as that seems!” The very act of bringing it out really helped me to trace
it— follow it all up and piece it all together. “They haven’t been good—they’ve
only been absent. It has been easy to live with them, because they’re simply
leading a life of their own. They’re not mine—they’re not ours. They’re his and
they’re hers!”, the fact that just as they are leading a life “of their own” they
could also not belong neither to her nor to Quint and Jessel, but only to
themselves doesn’t dawn upon her. The idea that children could be owners of
their own bodies and minds is so foreign to her, she can’t even conceive that
possibility. Children belong either to “good adults” or to “bad adults” - just as
women belong either to “good men” or “bad men” - but never to themselves. In
the 1994 documentary about NAMbLA, “Chickenhawk”[148], a NAMbLA
member has a short interaction with a woman telling him “children are not
yours”, just as the governess thinks Miles and Flora belong to her, not to them,
remember “too free with my boy”, that woman also believed that. But the quality
of owning children, regardless of who is owning them, is always not just as
oppressive, but also implicitly eroticized.“Quint’s and that woman’s?”“Quint’s
and that woman’s. They want to get to them.” Oh, how, at this, poor Mrs. Grose
appeared to study them! “But for what?”“For the love of all the evil that, in
those dreadful days, the pair put into them. And to ply them with that evil still, to
keep up the work of demons, is what brings the others back”, the language of
Evil here of course should be translated in the language of sexuality, in fact
conceptions of sexuality, particularly when it comes to children, and Evil often
intercept. Even in contemporary discourse. Pedophiles are often seen as
“demonic” and “Satan” often plays a role in moral panics about child sexuality
and/or pedophilia[149]. “They were rascals! But what can they now do?” she
pursued. “Do?” I echoed so loud that Miles and Flora, as they passed at their
distance, paused an instant in their walk and looked at us. “Don’t they do
enough?” I demanded in a lower tone, while the children, having smiled and
nodded and kissed hands to us, resumed their exhibition. We were held by it a
minute; then I answered: “They can destroy them!”,“They don’t know, as yet,
quite how—but they’re trying hard. They’re seen only across, as it were, and
beyond—in strange places and on high places, the top of towers, the roof of
houses, the outside of windows, the further edge of pools; but there’s a deep
design, on either side, to shorten the distance and overcome the obstacle; and
the success of the tempters is only a question of time. They’ve only to keep to
their suggestions of danger.” “For the children to come?” “And perish in the
attempt!” Mrs. Grose slowly got up, and I scrupulously added: “Unless, of
course, we can prevent!”, all of these passages are full of conceptions that if
analyzed point to contemporary conceptions of the Pedophile. He destroys
children forever - He could be anywhere and he kills children - “Prevention” is
needed. But the governess really does not care about “preventing harm”, we
know she is delighted by the spectacle of these perverted and corrupt little
creatures. “Standing there before me while I kept my seat, she visibly turned
things over. “Their uncle must do the preventing. He must take them away.”
“And who’s to make him?” She had been scanning the distance, but she now
dropped on me a foolish face. “You, Miss.” “By writing to him that his house is
poisoned and his little nephew and niece mad?” “But if they are, Miss?” “And if
I am myself, you mean? That’s charming news to be sent him by a governess
whose prime undertaking was to give him no worry”, she really does not long
for the return of the Patriarch in the queer house of Bly, despite all of her
pretense. The performativity of her love for him is exposed by her absolute
refusal to write to him, while it is true that he had told her he didn’t want to do
anything with the house, it is clear that he did not mean he wouldn’t have wanted
to be aware of a situation as extreme as this one. We know she only loved
demonic (sexual) but pretty kids from day one.
Despite the initial ambiguity about the identity of the figure “above them” in the
pivotal scene we discussed before, the governess tells us now that said figure,
even if it was obvious who the “little wretch” with a “secret” was worshipping,
was Quint: “The shock, in truth, had sunk into me still deeper than I knew on the
night when, looking out to see either Quint or Miss Jessel under the stars, I had
beheld the boy over whose rest I watched and who had immediately brought in
with him— had straightway, there, turned it on me—the lovely upward look with
which, from the battlements above me, the hideous apparition of Quint had
played”.
Follows the scene of Miles’s rebellion (even if he was rebelling from before she
even came at Bly), immediately after the governess’s comment about being like
a gaoler. Miles here will be in “age drag”[150], to borrow Zaborskis’s term that
she used in her article about “sexualized girls” in beauty pageants. We all start
with the assumption that boys want to be men because to be men means to have
power. Actually, everyone wants to be men, even women and girls, but only boys
can actually accomplish it. The radical Feminist Andrea Dworkin, in her anti
pornography book, “Pornography: Men Possessing Women”, tells us: “Boys
become men to escape being victims by definition. Girls would become men if
girls could, because it would mean freedom […]”.[151] This is fundamentally
true. But something a bit different is at play here. We have to abandon every
shade of Miles’s normativity that was present before because something is
happening. His death is approaching. Boys are valued in all societies, including
ours, on the assumption that they will become men, which means on the
assumption that they will not: become women, remain boys, or die. The last one
fits both of the previous. Miles did not know he’d die, in fact if we do not know
this, despite the precociousness, it can all fit in a quasi normative, if perverse,
paradigm, but he does. Miles wants to exploit the projection of his future
privilege to be able to foster a connection the adults around him try to negate to
him (in fact, sexist readings have been made, and the governess and Grose
portrayed as the women who deny male “mentors” to boys by conceptualizing
them as threats to keep them in an “underdeveloped” and “feminized” stage, in
these readings the fact that what he’s hinting at about Quint in the scenes is
sexual(ized) doesn’t matter, it’s seen as natural, even somehow itself non-
sexual), again by managing liminal rebellion and resistance in an overall
normative context. But it’s his death which complicates it. If Miles dies he
remains a boy forever, which means that he isn’t even a “boy”, because in the
identity of “boy” a future masculinity not embodied but at least aspired to and
desired is inherent. Boys who do not grow up are just girls. While without the
knowledge of his death this is just “age drag”, which is subversive in itself, with
the knowledge of it it’s not only age drag, but regular drag as well. The
governess might only be intimidated because she does not know he will remain
inferior to her forever, and it’s all intertwined because he is punished because he
was rebellious, as I’ve said and also illustrated looking at The Pupil’s Morgan,
bad boys do not deserve to become men, but there is something that seems to be
suggesting to me that a shade of knowledge that an un-subordinated, resistant
boy like Miles will never be a man, the governess had. This is why she likes it so
much, just as she (secretly) liked Flora taking charge. Miles’s performance of
(adult) masculinity is extremely campy and queer, and yet it scares the governess
while fascinating her, because despite herself, she is also very queer. “Look here,
my dear, you know,” he charmingly said, “when in the world, please, am I going
back to school?” Transcribed here the speech sounds harmless enough,
particularly as uttered in the sweet, high, casual pipe with which, at all
interlocutors, but above all at his eternal governess, he threw off intonations as
if he were tossing roses”, the talk is adult, but the voice is high pitched and
“sweet”, the governess remarks, which creates a contrast, and the request is
perverse - he wants to go back to school, and the governess has recognized the
school as a site of depravity and corruption. “I could feel in him how he already,
from my at first finding nothing to reply, perceived the advantage he had gained.
I was so slow to find anything that he had plenty of time, after a minute, to
continue with his suggestive but inconclusive smile: “You know, my dear, that for
a fellow to be with a lady always— !” His “my dear” was constantly on his lips
for me, and nothing could have expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment
with which I desired to inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity. It was so
respectfully easy”, as we’ve seen, his remark about not wanting to be with a lady
is charged with meaning, particularly in relation to his request of going back to
school, considering what we will learn about his conduct there in the last pages,
a conduct the governess had knowledge of, as I showed, she simply did not
imagine it to have worked the way Miles will describe to her. But that she can
justify, referring to some of the beliefs of the time “.But, oh, how I felt that at
present I must pick my own phrases! I remember that, to gain time, I tried to
laugh, and I seemed to see in the beautiful face with which he watched me how
ugly and queer I looked. “And always with the same lady?” I returned”, again
he is exposing her desire for him, she feels insecure over the fact that her
company doesn’t make him happy, not as happy as that of his, sarcastically
called, “poor little innocent mates”, in reference to the fact that they probably
weren’t at all, and “stupid, sordid, headmasters”, in short, he is showing us how
“ugly and queer” she is. And he is doing that by contrasting herself to him, to his
“beautiful face”, this is often the case with cases of pedophilia, the (most often
male) pedophile’s ugliness and depravity is contrasted with the child’s beauty
and purity. In the exact same way she previously contrasted Miles’s beauty and
purity to the ugliness and depravity of his comrades and masters at school, now
she is in their role. But what unnerves the governess is that Miles here is
behaving in the most “impure” manner possible. But Victorian gendered ideals
justify him, it is normal for a boy who is “getting on” as he says, to want to be
with men and not with ladies. Even if some people questioned them after the
“discovery” of pedophilia and homosexuality, Krafft-Ebing remarked that a
preference for the company of male adults in a boy could be the sign of an
“invert”[152], and also made quite a remark that is notable, particularly in relation
to The Pupil, that a male tutor is often an “invert”’s first lover[153]. Despite that,
for the most part, it was seen as a normal and justifiable request. But they didn’t
know what was going on with Miles. Only the governess does. “He neither
blenched nor winked. The whole thing was virtually out between us. “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.” I lingered there with him an instant ever so kindly.
“Yes, you’re getting on.” Oh, but I felt helpless!”, the reference he makes to
growing up, is also a reference to the awakening of the sexual instinct. It seems
that what he is trying to tell her, is that he has certain urges a “lady” cannot
satisfy. At least for now. And she feels “helpless”. In fact he references to her the
night he went out, that we already have analyzed: “I have kept to this day the
heartbreaking little idea of how he seemed to know that and to play with it. “And
you can’t say I’ve not been awfully good, can you?” I laid my hand on his
shoulder, for, though I felt how much better it would have been to walk on, I was
not yet quite able. “No, I can’t say that, Miles.” “Except just that one night, you
know—!”, she again seeks details, asking why he did that, even though she has
remarked on why he did: “That one night?” I couldn’t look as straight as he.
“Why, when I went down—went out of the house.” “Oh, yes. But I forget what
you did it for.”“You forget?”—he spoke with the sweet extravagance of childish
reproach. “Why, it was to show you I could!” “Oh, yes, you could.”“And I can
again”, this resistance to adult rule encompassed by this rebellion is remarkable,
but of course it has been often demonized and it’s uncanniness read as perverse
and sinister. He keeps asking to go back to school, but also deflects the questions
she asks him about whether he liked his school or not: “He resumed our walk
with me, passing his hand into my arm.“Then when am I going back?”I wore, in
turning it over, my most responsible air. “Were you very happy at school?”He
just considered. “Oh, I’m happy enough anywhere!”“Well, then,” I quavered,
“if you’re just as happy here—!”“Ah, but that isn’t everything! Of course you
know a lot—” “But you hint that you know almost as much?” I risked as he
paused. “Not half I want to!” Miles honestly professed. “But it isn’t so much
that.” “What is it, then?” “Well—I want to see more life”, this is a call for
independence, but Miles’s frustration do not limit themselves to his desire to go
out instead of being confined in a house, but they extend also to his desire for a
sexual freedom that the governess has been repressing since her arrive. His
comment on “wanting his own sort”, in the sexualized context of the
conversation, would again be perceived, in the England of the Wilde trials, as a
veiled reference to homosexuality. As we’ve seen, this performance of Miles as
the wealthy, a bit misogynous gentleman who prefers the company of (mainly
working class) males recalls the stereotype of the Victorian homosexual. But
Miles really is a child. Which casts him not only in this light, but as so many
other things as well, including the fatherless boy in search of a mentor, but
considering that he dies - meaning, he has no use for a “male role model” to
admire and aspire to, because he will never be a man -, he is mainly seen, by
both the governess and us, as a little abomination, a wicked child with a
voracious sexual appetite (For everyone, including the governess and us), a
revolting child.[154] He then tells the governess if his uncle “thinks what she
thinks”, meaning as he says, how he is “going on”, but the governess replies that
she doesn’t think he much cares, but we do not know this. It seems to me that the
uncle cares a lot about Miles’s upbringing as a future member of the ruling class,
he would want to know of these things, even if initially he had told her not to
bother him. She does not want him, at the core, to know or care. Because she is
enjoying the spectacle of abominable children. “He had got out of me that there
was something I was much afraid of and that he should probably be able to make
use of my fear to gain, for his own purpose, more freedom. My fear was of
having to deal with the intolerable question of the grounds of his dismissal from
school, for that was really but the question of the horrors gathered behind”, she
tells us, but he is not just exploiting her fear and panic, but her secret desire(s).
She is not (just) afraid of dealing with the question of his dismissal from school,
because she has been doing so since the beginning of the novel, but of the
sexualized feelings that situation arises in her. “The boy, to my deep
discomposure, was immensely in the right, was in a position to say to me:
“Either you clear up with my guardian the mystery of this interruption of my
studies, or you cease to expect me to lead with you a life that’s so unnatural for a
boy.” What was so unnatural for the particular boy I was concerned with was
this sudden revelation of a consciousness and a plan”, this passage that I already
quoted in a previous section, references how yes, Victorian culture valued non-
sexual but sublimated intergenerational relationships between males, but for this
“particular boy” something else is going on according to the governess. In a
passage, the governess directly admits her knowledge of what Miles did at
school, referring to something I noted: There isn’t much else they could have
thought. Well behaved boys get expelled for only one reason.“I’ll put it before
him,” I went on inexorably, “that I can’t undertake to work the question on
behalf of a child who has been expelled—” “For we’ve never in the least known
what!” Mrs. Grose declared. “For wickedness. For what else—when he’s so
clever and beautiful and perfect? Is he stupid? Is he untidy? Is he infirm? Is he
ill-natured? He’s exquisite—so it can be only that; and that would open up the
whole thing. After all,” I said, “it’s their uncle’s fault. If he left here such people
—!”, there was emphasis on the word “that” in the original text. Here, what she
means is hardly ambiguous. And her reference to “such people” does not
exonerate Miles, the implication is simply that “such people” enhanced what was
an already inherently perverse quality in the child. Which confirms how the
“trial” scene at the end of the book shines light on her and our prurient
curiosities. She couldn’t be clearer - she knows. Mrs.Grose proceeds to admit
that it isn’t the uncle’s fault, he didn’t know about their wickedness, it really is
hers. Then I’d take into consideration a dialogue the governess and Miles have in
Miles’s room: “Why, of course I heard you. Did you fancy you made no noise?
You’re like a troop of cavalry!” he beautifully laughed. “Then you weren’t
asleep?” “Not much! I lie awake and think.”
I had put my candle, designedly, a short way off, and then, as he held out his
friendly old hand to me, had sat down on the edge of his bed. “What is it,” I
asked, “that you think of?” “What in the world, my dear, but you?”, those last
words are a lover’s words, as he keeps attempting to lure the governess in, to
lure her in the same depravity embodied by him (and Flora). The governess tries
to keep her composure, spurning him: “Ah, the pride I take in your appreciation
doesn’t insist on that! I had so far rather you slept”, but he continues: “Well, I
think also, you know, of this queer business of ours.” I marked the coolness of
his firm little hand. “Of what queer business, Miles?” “Why, the way you bring
me up. And all the rest!”, it is indeed a very queer business. “What do you mean
by all the rest?” “Oh, you know, you know!”, the governess's constant request,
that we are about to see, of having things she already knows explained to her, is
often refused by the children, that tell her. “You know!”, thereby rendering
evident her pleasure at the knowledge of these so called “unspeakable” things.
“Certainly you shall go back to school,” I said, “if it be that that troubles you.
But not to the old place—we must find another, a better. How could I know it did
trouble you, this question, when you never told me so, never spoke of it at all?”
His clear, listening face, framed in its smooth whiteness, made him for the
minute as appealing as some wistful patient in a children’s hospital; and I would
have given, as the resemblance came to me, all I possessed on earth really to be
the nurse or the sister of charity who might have helped to cure him”, the
reference to the school as connected to the idea of the governess as a nurse or
“sister of charity”, puts into the spotlight how the depravity of Miles’s conduct is
seen almost as a contagious disease, that first, according to the school, he had
spread to his mates, and now to the governess, or at least is attempting to spread
to her. But she wants to cure him before it’s too late, before he can spread it to
her. It is true - she portrays herself as someone rescuing someone else from
something, but that something comes from Miles’s own body and mind - and
death might be the only cure. She needs to save him from himself. But it is also
an eroticized scene - the governess fixates her gaze on a Miles that is beautiful
because he looks sick. She thinks he looks like an hospital patient - and that
makes him attractive. In the Victorian era, there was an eroticization of the sick
or dead child.[155] Which brings us back to the other writing of Henry James I
referenced in addition to The Pupil, The Author Of Beltraffio, it is a long short
story, first published in 1884 in the English Illustrated Magazine. As opposed to
Miles and Morgan, who are quite agentive characters, Dolcino is much more
passive, even if he himself actuates a rebellion that warrants a punishment. But
another important point, that somehow lacks when it comes to Miles and
Morgan, is the lengthy eroticization of the sick and dead child. Miles and
Morgan die abruptly, they do not suffer a sickness throughout the narration, and
their dead bodies aren't fetishized. Dolcino’s is. Dolcino is not only more
objectified than Morgan, who is not beautiful, but also more than Miles, after all,
the governess of The Turn Of The Screw is still a woman. As we've seen,
women hold as much power over children as men do, we’ll se it in The Author
Of Beltraffio as well, and also promote the conceptualization of children as
ornaments, but the explicitly sexual oppression of children is perpetrated
exclusively by men, and so is an explicitly sexualized gaze. There is a
conceptualization, even after the end of the one sex model explained by
Laqueur[156], of “man” and “child” as two separate genders, even if the child is
biologically male, as “maleness” lacking secondary sexual characteristics, what
really differentiates the bodies of men and women, can never be authentic,
without even looking at all the social attributes connected to the construct
“masculinity” that children are not permitted access to. The mother in “The
Author Of Beltraffio” seems to be extremely anxious over her son spending time
with his father, the way she behaves almost seems to imply an anxiety over
possible incest. She thinks her husband, Mark Ambient, is a bad influence
because of a book he wrote, “Beltraffio”, hence the title. The narrator is a young
admirer of Mark Ambient, and in contrast, praises his work. Dolcino, who is not
the real name of the child, which we will never know, is a “little name of
endearment”, it is supposed to be an Italian word, meaning “little sweetheart”.
Dolcino, as soon as his mother leaves him for a second, runs to his father,
probably not understanding his mother’s behavior. When the narrator first sets
his gaze on him, there is a lengthy description of the almost outwardly beauty of
this child: “I had lost no time in observing that the child, who was not more than
seven years old, was extraordinarily beautiful. He had the face of an angel - the
eyes, the hair, the more than mortal bloom, the smile of innocence. There was
something touching, almost alarming, in his beauty, which seemed to be
composed of elements too fine and pure for the breath of this world. When I
spoke to him, and he came and held out his hand and smiled at me, I felt a
sudden pity for him, as if he had been an orphan, or a changeling, or stamped
with some social stigma. It was impossible to be, in fact, more exempt from these
misfortunes, and yet, as one kissed him, it was hard to keep from murmuring
“Poor little devil!” though why one should have applied this epithet to a living
cherub is more than I can say. Afterwards, indeed, I knew a little better; I simply
discovered that he was too charming to live, wondering at the same time that his
parents should not have perceived it, and should not be in proportionate grief
and despair. For myself, I had no doubt of his evanescence, having already
noticed that there is a kind of charm which is like a death warrant”, and the
revelation of Dolcino’s fate. He is too beautiful to live. But it’s not only that, we
will see it. Dolcino keeps asking his mother to allow him to stay with his father,
which irritates her. Soon she will start to see perversity in the way Dolcino defies
her, and in his desiring the company of someone she has coded as a sexual
danger even if it’s his own father. Mark Ambient’s admirer does not shy away
from telling him how he feels about his son: “He’s so beautiful - so fascinating.
He’s like a little work of art”. Dolcino might be more passive than Miles and
Morgan as I said, but he also has a rebellious nature that his mother wants to
repress as soon as it shows, “he’s very precocious and very sensitive, and his
mother thinks she can’t begin to guard him too early”. The way Dolcino’s father
is coded as a sexual danger is almost explicited, implying that his mother’s panic
isn’t limited to the “rather queer” ideas she thinks her husband promotes and that
she believes could influence the child; “It is as if it were a subtle poison, or a
contagion, or something that would rub off on Dolcino when his father kisses
him or holds him on his knee. If she could, she would prevent Mark from ever
touching him”, the idea of the “contagion”, that we also just saw in The Turn, is
also reminiscent of the politics of man-boy pedophilia, the belief that a boy who
has been sexually abused will become a pedophilic or otherwise deviant man,
that was very common in the literature[157] and also upheld by most people's
conception of the sexual offending of children. There might be an hint of truth to
it, but the way it has been portrayed has stripped it of any potentiality of
highlighting certain issues of sexual violence. The threat in this case, as it also
was in The Turn, also seems to loom even larger than that. The contagion seems
to be a threat for females as well, the governess in The Turn, and Mrs.Ambient
in “The Author Of Beltraffio”, and to be more than simply the “abused to
abuser” paradigm, the implication is that the children, once one has failed to
prevent their falling victims to this “contagion”, which could come from
whatever, from school, from depraved servants, from a book or from a father, are
a menace to sexual morality as a whole and that it can only be saved by killing
them off. It is true that Mark Ambient does want Dolcino to read his works, but
not now, because he does not consider a child or even an adolescent capable
enough to understand the work: “Before twenty it would be useless, he wouldn’t
understand them”, to prevent him from reading them, they believe it suffices to
tell him that “they are not intended for small boys”, because “if you bring him up
properly, after that he won’t touch them”. Mrs Ambient did remark that
forbidding him to read certain books as an adolescent would become awkward,
but in the house there is the belief that "young people should not read novels”,
“Good ones - certainly not!”, and not even out of concern for their morality -
but because a young readership would tarnish the novel’s serious reputation, it is
implied, but that is also the fault of women like Mrs.Ambient, he “alludes”.
There is a line which has Mark Ambient remarking, about his wife: “She thinks
me, at any rate, no better than an ancient Greek”, a blatant allusion, particularly
at the time, to intergenerational sexual contact between males[158]. In fact, it has
been often speculated that Mark Ambient’s character was inspired by John
Addington Symonds, and that “Beltraffio” was inspired by one of Symond’s
writings on Greek pederasty, who remarkably still has some scholarly value, “A
Problem In Greek Ethics”[159]. Symonds also had a wife and children. But what
seems to separate them is the fact that Symonds did talk about sexual contact
between men and boys, actually, as we’ve seen, most often negatively, but was
sexually attracted, and it was a central part of his identity, to robust young men, a
homosexual in the fullest sense of the word, rather than a pedophile or a
pederast. While nothing directly points to the fact that Mark Ambient’s character
sexually desires children, his wife perceives him that way. And some sort of
vindication of pedophilic desire is also what his admirers seem to admire him
for, considering that we see the narrator’s fetishization of Dolcino’s beauty,
which it is true, was not particularly atypical for the Victorian novel, from the
beginning of the book. I believe that there is some sort of connection between
Mark Ambient’s character and the Uranian poets, a group of underground poets
of quite diverse backgrounds who used to write (looking back, quite mediocre)
poetry in praise of young boys’s beauty[160], those fitting perfectly in the
definition of “pedophiles”. Boys of seven like Dolcino or even younger
sometimes featured in their writings. Henry James himself sometimes also
had an attention to that sort of beauty, like when in 1889 he purchased in Rome a
bust by Hendrik Anderson representing Count Alberto Bevilacqua, a young boy,
and then wrote to the sculptor: “I shall have him constantly before me, as a
loved companion and friend. He is so living, so human, so sympathetic and
sociable and curious, that I see it will be a lifelong attachment…I have struck up
a tremendous intimacy with dear little Count Alberto, and we literally can’t live
without each other. He is the first
object that greets my eyes in the
morning, and the last at night”[161].
As Swaab said while talking about
Hopkins, the “problem for boy-
enthusiasts is of course that boys
won’t always be boys”[162], but the
association with Count Alberto can be
a “lifelong attachment” because,
exactly like a dead boy, like Dolcino,
he will never age. That isn’t the only
occasion in which Henry James has
remarked something similar[163], but it
is the most useful in assessing the
association between eroticism and a
still, immobile, child. Despite Henry
James’s remarking on how “living”
the bust is, the fact is that it plainly is
not, which makes it a splendid
companion.
After Mark Ambient has assessed
that “nothing shall ever hurt”
Dolcino, thanks to Mrs.Ambient, we
slowly will be shown that it is not the
case. Dolcino is starting to be sick,
and the narrator tells us: “The child was rather white, but the main difference I
saw in him was that he was even more beautiful than the day before. He had
been dressed in his festal garments - a velvet suit and a crimson sash - and he
looked like a little invalid prince, too young to know condescension, and smiling
familiarly on his subjects”, the “little invalid prince” recalling the governess’s
“little fairy prince”, “I had a consciousness, not yet acute, but quite sufficient, of
all this; but I must say that if it chilled my flow of small talk, it didn’t prevent me
from thinking that the beautiful mother and beautiful child, interlaced there
against their background of roses, made a picture such as I perhaps should not
see again. I was free, I supposed, to go into the house and write letters, to sit in
the drawing room, to repair to my own apartment and take a nap; but the only
use I made of my freedom was to linger still in my chair and say to myself that
the light hand of Sir Joshua might have painted Mark Ambient’s wife and son”,
this association between Mrs.Ambient’s beauty and Dolcino’s is again another
one of those associations between women and children. He goes on to write: “I
found myself looking perpetually at Dolcino, and Dolcino looked back at me,
and that was enough to detain me. When he looked at me he smiled, and I felt it
was an absolute impossibility to abandon a child who was smiling at one like
that. His eyes never wandered; they attached themselves to mine, as if among all
the small incipient things of his nature there was a desire to say something to me.
If I could have taken him upon my own knee he perhaps would have managed to
say it; but it would have been far too delicate a matter to ask his mother to give
him up, and it has remained a constant regret for me that on that Sunday
afternoon I did not, even for a moment, hold Dolcino in my arms”, Dolcino says
he is fine, but the narrator does not agree: “He had said that he felt remarkably
well, and that he was especially happy; but though he may have been happy,
with his charming head pillowed on his mother’s breast and his little crimson
silk legs depending on her lap, I did not think he looked well”. “He made no
attempt to walk about; he was content to swing his legs softly and strike one as
languid and angelic”. But again, he keeps insisting he is well, which his father
believes he is only saying to be “agreeable”. “The boy seemed to meditate on
this distinction, this imputation, for a moment; then his exaggerated eyes, which
had wandered, caught my own as I watched him. “Do you think me agreeable?”
he inquired, with the candour of his age and with a smile that made his father
turn round to me, laughing and ask, mutely, with a glance, “Isn’t he adorable?”,
“Then why don’t you hop about, if you feel so lusty?” Ambient went on, while
the boy swung his hand. “Because mamma is holding me close!”, “Oh yes I
know how momma holds you when I come near!” Ambient exclaimed, looking at
his wife”, there are hints of the child’s much more implied perversity as opposed
to for example, Miles’s, that are scattered throughout the text. The way he asks
his father’s admirer, the character who is most invested with his beauty, “Do you
think me agreeable?”, is one of them. For example, “the boy’s little fixed white
face seemed, as before, to plead with me to stay, and after a while it produced
still another effect, a very curious one, which I shall find difficult to express. Of
course I expose myself to the charge of attempting to give fantastic reasons for
an act which may have been simply the fruit of native want of discretion; and
indeed the traceable consequences of that perversity were too lamentable to
leave me any desire to trifle with the question. All I can say is that I acted in
perfect good faith, and that Dolcino’s friendly little gaze gradually kindled the
spark of my inspiration” is also one. The fact that he asks his mother, “Don’t you
like papa’s books?”, and most importantly to the narrator, “Won’t you read them
to me, American gentleman?” also helps Beatrice confirm her thesis that there is
only one way to make him stop. “I offered to carry him, and held out my hands
to take him; but she thanked me and turned away, with the child seated on her
arm, his head on her shoulder”, “I am very strong” she said, as she passed into
the house, and her slim flexible figure bent backwards with the filial weight”,
“So I never touched Dolcino”. The line, “So I never touched Dolcino” or “So I
never laid a longing hand on Dolcino” proves that Beatrice’s Ambient quest to
“protect” him was successful, even if it came at a price. The realization that his
wife is medically neglecting, a form of child abuse[164], angers Mark Ambient.
“She refused to let the doctor see him an hour ago!” Miss Ambient remarked,
with intention, as they say on the stage. “Refused to let the doctor see him? By
heaven, I’ll smash in the door!”, Beatrice’s aim, that of preventing anyone to
“lay a longing hand on Dolcino”, is rendered explicit in this passage: “She
sacrificed him - she determined to do nothing to make him live. Why else did she
lock herself up - why else did she turn away the doctor? The book gave her a
horror, she determined to rescue him - to prevent him from ever being touched”.
Dolcino is now dead, and we can observe that “Poor little Dolcino was more
exquisitely beautiful in death than he had been in life”. The story closes itself
with some irony: “When the new book came out - it was long delayed - she read
it over as a whole, and her husband told me that a few months before her death -
she failed rapidly after losing her son, sank into a consumption and faded away
at Mentone during those few supreme weeks she even dipped into Beltraffio”.
“The Author Of Beltraffio” is another work of Henry James that puts spotlight
on the themes previously seen, of adult power over children, this, as evidenced
here, dramatically includes the power of parents to end their child’s lives without
paying for it, by withholding medical care from them, the threat posed by a
knowledgeable and sexual child, and the pedophilic gaze on a child’s body, in
here, particularly on a sick and dead child’s body. Dolcino’s death is yes, a
moment of aesthetic satisfaction for the narrator, who it is true, never managed
to satisfy his desire to “lay a longing hand on Dolcino” but thanks to his death
managed to gaze on his “exquisite” corpse, but it is also the punishment Dolcino
deserves, for his “precocious” intelligence, for his interest in reading the
forbidden books of his father, for his desire to break away from his mother and
go to his supposed “corruptor”, a desire that Beatrice reads to mean that Dolcino
was always corrupted, for his flirtatious behavior, for his beauty which was a
“death warrant” from the beginning.
Now that we have analyzed it, we can go back to The Turn Of The Screw.
The governess associates the act of “curing” Miles with him confessing about
what happened at school, longing to hear the details she has only imagined until
then, in this manner she can somehow purify this interest. Similarly, but not in
the same way as in contemporary cases of suspected CSA, Miles “confessing”
would result to her as being one of the first steps to his “saving”, which includes
his death. But that is also feeding a “deviant” interest of hers. Paradoxically,
while it is a step further in “saving” Miles (from himself) it is also a step further
in the governess’s debauching .“Do you know you’ve never said a word to me
about your school—I mean the old one; never mentioned it in any way? ”Never,
little Miles—no, never—have you given me an inkling of anything that may have
happened there. Therefore you can fancy how much I’m in the dark. Until you
came out, that way, this morning, you had, since the first hour I saw you, scarce
even made a reference to anything in your previous life. You seemed so perfectly
to accept the present”, there also is an allusion to the possibility that it is Quint
who is instigating Miles to not reveal what happened in this instance as well as
in many others, and Britten will make it explicit, like many other parts of the
novel that were left implied. Again this is also, as we’ve seen, a similarity to
modern conceptualizations of pedophilia - in which the pedophile encourages the
child to keep secrets. While the fact that some children are threatened by their
sexual assaulters and forced to stay silent over their victimization is a very real
problem, the anxiety adults experience at the thought of a child with “secrets”,
particularly sexual secrets, reflects a wider problem in our society, that of adults
who would only be truly comfortable when they have invaded completely
children’s intimate sphere. This also belies a desire to hear sordid stories
centering them, while feeling morally justified. The panic over pedophilia is
probably as responsible for children’s non disclosure of sexual abuse as sexual
abusers’s threats. Also, children should feel no pressure on disclosing a
traumatic sexual experience, the fact that they know that once they have just
hinted at the fact that they were sexually victimized they will be heavily
pressured for more information also probably influences the lack of disclosure of
forced/traumatic sexual experiences among children. Which brings us back to
the passage quoted at the beginning of this section, which the governess thinks in
this context: “It was extraordinary how my absolute conviction of his secret
precocity (or whatever I might call the poison of an influence that I dared but
half to phrase) made him, in spite of the faint breath of his inward trouble,
appear as accessible as an older person—imposed him almost as an intellectual
equal”.
The governess tells him “I thought you wanted to go on as you are”, and they
have this interaction: “I don’t—I don’t. I want to get away.” “You’re tired of
Bly?”“Oh, no, I like Bly.”“Well, then—?” “Oh, you know what a boy wants!”.
Perhaps “what a boy wants” is more freedom, but this an explicitly eroticized
context. He says “what a boy wants” in reference to what he wants, and we’ve
seen what Miles wants, which he generalizes to deny its deviance. We’ve seen
and he had told the governess it is something a “lady” cannot give, which had
left the governess feeling disappointed over her failure at satisfying him, but
perhaps, as we see from her sometimes weirdly masculinized behaviors, she is
not so ladylike, even if she is very good at pretending she is. “I felt that I didn’t
know so well as Miles, and I took temporary refuge. “You want to go to your
uncle?” Again, at this, with his sweet ironic face, he made a movement on the
pillow. “Ah, you can’t get off with that!”, this passage also becomes
unintentionally sexualized, because “getting off” has a double meaning in the
English language. “You can’t get off” with the uncle, not just because of the
incest taboo, but also because the uncle is the only completely normative
character in the whole novel, the only character who does not “get off” with
children. “I was silent a little, and it was I, now, I think, who changed colour.
“My dear, I don’t want to get off!” “You can’t, even if you do. You can’t, you
can’t!”—he lay beautifully staring”, this passage probably remains funny to the
average reader, considering that since Wilson, probably even misogynistically,
there has been extensive writing about how the governess’s inability to “get off”
lies at the heart of her troubles. Miles telling her that she can’t do something, not
“get off” easily, is again a reversal of the traditional roles of adult and child. And
yet, even while he forbids her, the adult, to do something, he is “beautiful”,
maybe it is because of that that he is. We have seen that she had liked it with
Flora. “The exultation with which he uttered this helped me somehow, for the
instant, to meet him rather more. “And how much will you, Miles, have to tell
him? There are things he’ll ask you!” He turned it over. “Very likely. But what
things?” “The things you’ve never told me. To make up his mind what to do with
you. He can’t send you back—” “Oh, I don’t want to go back!” he broke in. “I
want a new field”, the use of the word “field” again codes the school as a
sexualized space, even if in this context it is Miles who controls it rather than
being victimized by it like the governess had described. “I threw myself upon
him and in the tenderness of my pity I embraced him. “Dear little Miles, dear
little Miles—!” My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, simply taking it
with indulgent good humour. “Well, old lady?” “Is there nothing—nothing at all
that you want to tell me?”, the governess’s repeated questioning at the end is
associated with her physical, sexualized “aggression” on Miles, maybe this was
her attempt at giving him “what a boy wants”, note the fact that being the one
kissing the other party almost forcibly and without consent she is embodying a
“male” role, women generally do not “kiss”, they are “kissed”, in the case of
children it is true that they do kiss, but not in this if not sexual at least very
romantic manner, to extort the confession from him, but it is largely the other
way around - it is Miles who has the upper end at the moment and her
uncontrolled expression of affection belies a deep seated desire. He does because
he lacks the involvement, his cold comment, already quoted in another section,
is exposing the governess’s pathetic lack of control over this extremely “deviant"
desire, his almost offensive rebuffing of her confirming what he said before,
“you can’t get off”. He is adamant on this: “He turned off a little, facing round
toward the wall and holding up his hand to look at as one had seen sick children
look. “I’ve told you—I told you this morning.” Oh, I was sorry for him! “That
you just want me not to worry you?” He looked round at me now, as if in
recognition of my understanding him; then ever so gently, “To let me alone,” he
replied”, he is exercising his right to personal privacy, which is something
children were and are constantly denied. And again he is compared to a sick
child, and that is aestheticized. “God knows I never wished to harass him, but I
felt that merely, at this, to turn my back on him was to abandon or, to put it more
truly, to lose him”, lose him to whom, to what? To Quint, to himself? The
governess seems to be revealing the other, less pure, less normative side to her
fight against the Others, sexual rivalry. Which features in adult’s, mainly men
actually, and for men it is much more normative, fight against pedophilia all too
often. “He gazed up at me again. “Before what?”“Before you came back. And
before you went away.” For some time he was silent, but he continued to meet
my eyes. “What happened?” It made me, the sound of the words, in which it
seemed to me that I caught for the very first time a small faint quaver of
consenting consciousness—it made me drop on my knees beside the bed and
seize once more the chance of possessing him”, again the questioning is
associated with something eroticized, “possession” is often also used as an
euphemism for penetrative sexual relations, which again belies the governess’s
hidden queerness. And her parallelism with the ghosts. In fact, demonic or
ghostly possession seems to center mainly on women and children, “possessed”
adult males being very rare[165], not only because it threatens masculinity and
masculine agency in the sense that the possessed subject is disempowered and at
the mercy of a more powerful being, the threat posed by the “possessed” actually
coming from this being, while the occupied body is simply a vessel, but because
it is inherently sexualized. A lot of discourses of supernatural possession sound
sometimes highly ambiguous, and seem to reflect the way men’s sexual relations
with women, and by mainly opposers of it but also some pedophiles, with
children have been conceived. “Dear little Miles, dear little Miles, if you knew
how I want to help you! It’s only that, it’s nothing but that, and I’d rather die
than give you a pain or do you a wrong—I’d rather die than hurt a hair of you.
Dear little Miles”—oh, I brought it out now even if I should go too far—“I just
want you to help me to save you!” But I knew in a moment after this that I had
gone too far”, here comes the realization that her lack of self governance around
a child would discredit her authority in their mind, the realization that a child has
deeply humiliated her, that the “gaoler” perhaps had let some less than
wholesome secret wishes take control of her. But maybe Miles isn’t that cruel,
“So for a moment we remained, while I stared about me and saw that the drawn
curtains were unstirred and the window tight. “Why, the candle’s out!” I then
cried. “It was I who blew it, dear!” said Miles”, maybe he will let her “get off”
after all.
When the governess and Mrs.Grose have to go look for Flora, who disappeared,
Mrs.Grose asks her about leaving Miles with Quint, and she says she isn’t
bothered: “She had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions. “You leave him—?”
“So long with Quint? Yes—I don’t mind that now”, Miles is now corrupted,
trying to prevent anything else from happening has become senseless. The
governess has understood death is the only remedy, as we’ve seen.
When the governess finds Flora (with, according to her, Jessel) at the lake, she
thinks: “Prepared and on her guard as our pursuit had actually made her, she
would repress every betrayal; and I was therefore shaken, on the spot, by my
first glimpse of the particular one for which I had not allowed. To see her,
without a convulsion of her small pink face, not even feign to glance in the
direction of the prodigy I announced, but only, instead of that, turn at me an
expression of hard, still gravity, an expression absolutely new and unprecedented
and that appeared to read and accuse and judge me—this was a stroke that
somehow converted the little girl herself into the very presence that could make
me quail”, Flora is now herself the “presence that could make her quail”,
because trough her association with Miss Jessel, she has become, in a sexualized
sense, “not…a child”, “but an old, old woman”. Flora is now no more an
helpless victim, but the enemy itself. In the misogynistic discourses about
“sexualized” girls, girls’s (and to an extent, women’s as well. Both the women
who “influence” the girls and the older girls who would have not have been
considered children had they been male) ability to decide for themselves is
constantly undermined, and they are perceived as being victims of other people,
bad women (who as I just said are in turn seen also as not possessing full
agency), media, deviant men, but because it is assumed that they are
unknowledgeable, and ready to change when good adults show them the right
way. A defiant girl who refuses to give up her “sexualized”, adult ways, is going
to be understood as an enemy. This is true about all discourses centering
pedophilia, that secretly the child is just as despised when they do not fit into
adult expectations of victimhood, but what is (almost) unique to girls is the fact
that what is conceptualized as “actual” pedophilia does not need to be
happening, and that it is associated with precocious adulthood (an old, old
woman).
In that moment, Mrs.Grose is not seeing Miss Jessel (Evil), which might be a
reference to the fact that Mrs.Grose had the habit to justify Flora’s conduct as
evidenced by some passages. She in fact defies the governess and agrees with
Flora that nobody is there.
“Flora continued to fix me with her small mask of reprobation, and even at that
minute I prayed God to forgive me for seeming to see that, as she stood there
holding tight to our friend’s dress, her incomparable childish beauty had
suddenly failed, had quite vanished. I’ve said it already—she was literally, she
was hideously, hard; she had turned common and almost ugly”, Flora’s “childish
beauty” had vanished with her sexualization, because in contrast to “sexualized
boys” (for whom no parallel moral panic exists, even if they are easily
identifiable and omnipresent because the “erotic child” is omnipresent, which
proves that the moral panic about girls is not founded in the sexualization of
childhood in itself, but of girlhood, which is seen a more ambiguous category),
for whom sexualization is based on childish features, sexualized girls’s
sexualization is rooted in their nascent but still immature womanly features,
meaning, girlish features (“The perfect girl is already part woman”), which are
different from both childish and womanly features, but on which our culture
places just as much value. They are also the most problematized because they
blur the boundaries between childhood and adulthood together in ways that are
not permissible to boys, because of how strict the differentiation between
“childish” and “manly” is. In this sense, girls are the ultimate frontier of the
demonic. This makes them “almost ugly”, and “common”, generally an allusion
to “loose” women. “Then, after this deliverance, which might have been that of a
vulgarly pert little girl in the street, she hugged Mrs. Grose more closely and
buried in her skirts the dreadful little face. In this position she produced an
almost furious wail. “Take me away, take me away—oh, take me away from
her!” “From me?” I panted.
“From you—from you!” she cried”, here is a “vulgarly pert little girl in the
street”’s plea to get away from a “good female role model” who is trying to tame
her. “The wretched child had spoken exactly as if she had got from some outside
source each of her stabbing little words, and I could therefore, in the full despair
of all I had to accept, but sadly shake my head at her. “If I had ever doubted, all
my doubt would at present have gone. I’ve been living with the miserable truth,
and now it has only too much closed round me. Of course I’ve lost you: I’ve
interfered, and you’ve seen—under her dictation”—with which I faced, over the
pool again, our infernal witness—“the easy and perfect way to meet it. I’ve done
my best, but I’ve lost you. Good-bye”, while Flora is described as having got that
behavior from someone else, she is now “lost”, she has become unredeemable as
well. From now on she says she did not saw a great deal of Flora anymore, but
“as by an ambiguous compensation” she saw a lot of Miles. Despite the fact that
he had reclaimed his freedom and had obtained it, the governess tells us: “He
paused a moment by the door as if to look at me; then—as if to share them—
came to the other side of the hearth and sank into a chair. We sat there in
absolute stillness; yet he wanted, I felt, to be with me”, and he did because he
recognizes in the governess’s the same sort of queerness he recognizes in
himself. This really is Miles’s unforgivable sin.“Before a new day, in my room,
had fully broken, my eyes opened to Mrs. Grose, who had come to my bedside
with worse news. Flora was so markedly feverish that an illness was perhaps at
hand; she had passed a night of extreme unrest, a night agitated above all by
fears that had for their subject not in the least her former, but wholly her present,
governess”, in Britten’s opera, there is a much more interesting passage about
Flora’s feverish state, and it will be analyzed in the section devoted to the opera,
but this too is interesting. Flora is tormented by dreams she tells us, involver her
not Miss Jessel and it was: “…Not against the possible re-entrance of Miss
Jessel on the scene that she protested—it was conspicuously and passionately
against mine”, the governess’s panic, as evidenced in the scene of the lake,
enrages Flora deeply and even terrorizes her. It is against her Flora feels she
needs to protect herself from, not against Miss Jessel. “My visitor’s trouble, truly,
was great. “Ah, Miss, it isn’t a matter on which I can push her! Yet it isn’t either,
I must say, as if I much needed to. It has made her, every inch of her, quite old.”
“Oh, I see her perfectly from here. She resents, for all the world like some high
little personage, the imputation on her truthfulness and, as it were, her
respectability. ‘Miss Jessel indeed—she!’ Ah, she’s ‘respectable,’ the chit! The
impression she gave me there yesterday was, I assure you, the very strangest of
all; it was quite beyond any of the others. I did put my foot in it! She’ll never
speak to me again”, here the boundaries between Flora and Miss Jessel are
blurred, just as girlhood blurs the boundaries between childhood and adulthood,
and we do not exactly know who has been made “quite old”, and who is not
respectable. Then the governess demonizes the intelligent child, intelligence, of
course in the sense of unchildlike intelligence, being a feature that is seen as
dangerous in children, and particularly the intelligent child who is made even
more intelligent by the knowledge of sexuality: “Nothing in the world! You’ve
the cleverest little person to deal with. They’ve made them—their two friends, I
mean—still cleverer even than nature did; for it was wondrous material to play
on! Flora has now her grievance, and she’ll work it to the end”. Jessel and
Quint made them “still cleverer even than nature did”. The governess then
decides to send Flora away with Mrs.Grose, and says: “Only to tell on you—?”
“No, not ‘only’! To leave me, in addition, with my remedy.” She was still vague.
“And what is your remedy?”“Your loyalty, to begin with. And then Miles’s”,
Flora is also a rebellious child, but she does not die, the supreme punishment is
inflicted on Miles, who is the child that is actually seen as being the real source
of the poisonous influence. But why is it so? Not just because as we’ve seen
boys’s socialization as we’ve seen was regarded as more important, so they were
greater sources of anxiety for Victorian educators, or because of the governess’s
greater interest in him. The main reason, is that while Flora’s had been taught by
Miss Jessel how to be like her, the implication for Miles is that of direct sexual
contact with Peter Quint, a much greater sin, as it is a concrete act of sexual
copulation which encompasses most of the taboos of the Victorian era (Sodomy,
sexual contact between adults and prepubescents, sexual contact between poor
males and members of the upperclass). An act whose signs might be still
readable on Miles’s body, as Savoy argues[167]. “She looked at me hard. “Do you
think he—?”“Won’t, if he has the chance, turn on me? Yes, I venture still to
think it. At all events, I want to try. Get off with his sister as soon as possible and
leave me with him alone.” I was amazed, myself, at the spirit I had still in
reserve, and therefore perhaps a trifle the more disconcerted at the way in
which, in spite of this fine example of it, she hesitated. “There’s one thing, of
course,” I went on: “they mustn’t, before she goes, see each other for three
seconds”, the governess now has anxiety on having Flora and Miles interact,
because their strong bond, and the solidarity that exists between them, endangers
her adult supremacy. And also because Miles, as we’ve seen, the most
thoroughly debauched child who can be redeemed only trough death, is
dangerous to others who can still be saved in other ways as long as he is still
alive, but there is a perverse pleasure the governess takes at them being left
alone. At this point she herself has become conscious of her own debauchery,
which could be argued is what brings her to such an extreme act, and the best
company for her right now is the only character which portrayed just as if not
more debauched as her, Miles. Despite knowing that he needs to die, she is just
as determined as before in satisfying her (sexual) desire of knowing the details
of what happened, which will culminate in the “trial scene”: “And yet what?”
“Well, are you so sure of the little gentleman?”“I’m not sure of anything but
you. But I have, since last evening, a new hope. I think he wants to give me an
opening. I do believe that—poor little exquisite wretch!—he wants to speak. Last
evening, in the firelight and the silence, he sat with me for two hours as if it were
just coming.” Mrs. Grose looked hard, through the window, at the grey,
gathering day. “And did it come?” “No, though I waited and waited, I confess it
didn’t, and it was without a breach of the silence or so much as a faint allusion
to his sister’s condition and absence that we at last kissed for good-night”.
Mrs.Grose also reports to the governess that Flora has spoken “horrors” about
her: She shook her head with dignity. “I’ve heard—!” “Heard?” “From that
child—horrors! There!” she sighed with tragic relief. “On my honour, Miss, she
says things—!” But at this evocation she broke down; she dropped, with a
sudden sob, upon my sofa and, as I had seen her do before, gave way to all the
grief of it. It was quite in another manner that I, for my part, let myself go. “Oh,
thank God!” She sprang up again at this, drying her eyes with a groan. “ ‘Thank
God’?” “It so justifies me!” “It does that, Miss!”I couldn’t have desired more
emphasis, but I just hesitated. “She’s so horrible?” I saw my colleague scarce
knew how to put it. “Really shocking.” “And about me?” “About you, Miss—
since you must have it. It’s beyond everything, for a young lady; and I can’t think
wherever she must have picked up—” “The appalling language she applied to
me? I can, then!” I broke in with a laugh that was doubtless significant
enough”, again, while they say that she has picked them up from “someone
else”, it is still she who is “so horrible”. “She may be different? she may be
free?” I seized her almost with joy. “Then, in spite of yesterday, you believe—”
“In such doings?” Her simple description of them required, in the light of her
expression, to be carried no further, and she gave me the whole thing as she had
never done. “I believe”, Flora has to become “different”, implying that in her
saving she needs to change herself, it’s in her that the perversity lies in. And she
can become so because her body has not been acted upon, unlike Miles’s. For the
governess, sending a letter to the children’s uncle was an extreme act, but it has
been stolen - of course, by Miles. We’ve seen how the governess’s refusal to
contact the uncle until very late on could signify a resistance to
heteronormativity. Miles’s act of stealing the letter is an act of protection towards
the queer space of Bly, which can remain so only if normative figures like the
uncle are excluded, and an ultimate attempt to bring the governess to his side,
like spending time with her was in the previous pages, because of course it is not
just the governess who is trying to bring him to her side, the reverse is also true.
Then there is a passage in which Mrs.Grose is almost humored for her
understandable naivety: “They proved to be so indeed, but she could still blush,
almost, to show it. “I make out now what he must have done at school.” And she
gave, in her simple sharpness, an almost droll disillusioned nod. “He stole!” I
turned it over—I tried to be more judicial. “Well— perhaps.” She looked as if
she found me unexpectedly calm. “He stole letters!”. The line is explicitly
construed to evidence Mrs.Grose lack of (sexual) knowledge and her innocence
brought on by her lack of education (and in a way, by her gender). “Leave us,
leave us”—I was already, at the door, hurrying her off. “I’ll get it out of him.
He’ll meet me—he’ll confess. If he confesses, he’s saved. And if he’s saved—”
“Then you are?” The dear woman kissed me on this, and I took her farewell”, of
course Miles will not be saved by confession, but by death. The governess
acknowledges that if Miles is “saved”, in the sense of dead, she will also be
“saved”, because Miles brought out the the queerness that resided in her since
even before coming to Bly. And that will not be just her, if Miles, the source of
the bad influence, because one could say it was injected in him trough his sexual
intercourse with Quint, is saved, dead, then normativity at Bly can be
reestablished. While reflecting, the governess thinks: “What he would now
permit this office to consist of was yet to be settled: there was a queer relief, at
all events—I mean for myself in especial—in the renouncement of one
pretension. If so much had sprung to the surface, I scarce put it too strongly in
saying that what had perhaps sprung highest was the absurdity of our
prolonging the fiction that I had anything more to teach him”, the idea that the
governess has anything more to teach Miles is a “fiction”, the governess is
somehow recognizing the performative nature of the roles of “adult” and “child”,
of “teacher” and “student”. Not only she has nothing more to teach to Miles, but
it is Miles who has been teaching her, and he is a bad educator indeed. “Here at
present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium
depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as
possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against
nature”, it is not shutting her eyes to the acts “against nature” themselves (a
reference Victorian readers, as we’ve seen in the context of the Wilde trial,
probably associated with sodomitical relations) committed at Miles’s school or at
Bly, she has had her eyes wide open to them during this whole time, but to the
fact that the unchildike qualities of the children, their rebellious behaviors, their
purported enjoyment of the sexual acts she saw forced on them, particularly on
Miles, are against “nature”, and “revoltingly” so - a normalizing social
construction in itself, that often she as well puts under question. “How could I
put even a little of that article into a suppression of reference to what had
occurred? How, on the other hand, could I make a reference without a new
plunge into the hideous obscure?” she understands that to keep inquiring is
dangerous to her, because each times she does reference what happened she
newly “plunges into the hideous obscure” of perverse sexual desire. “What had
his intelligence been given him for but to save him?”, the governess wonders
about Miles, as she cannot comprehend what a child might do with intelligence
that is not pleasing adults. “It was as if, when we were face to face in the dining-
room, he had literally shown me the way”, of course the only way a child can do
that is if they are not really a child - he is again in age drag, and asks about
Flora: “I say, my dear, is she really very awfully ill?”, like Mark Ambient might
ask Beatrice about Dolcino’s state. Here we see the sexualized narrative between
Miles and the governess reaching its peak, which communicates to us the fact
that killing him off has become indispensable and urgent, before he succeeds
into fully turning the governess into a bad queer child like him: “We continued
silent while the maid was with us—as silent, it whimsically occurred to me, as
some young couple who, on their wedding-journey, at the inn, feel shy in the
presence of the waiter. He turned round only when the waiter had left us. “Well
—so we’re alone!””, it is a young couple, in her fantasy, they’re both the same
age, the queer child buried into the normative adult is trying to escape and marry
the one she sees in front of her. Boundaries of age keep getting disrupted. Like
the forbidden lovers they are, they remark: “Oh, more or less.” I fancy my smile
was pale. “Not absolutely. We shouldn’t like that!” I went on. “No—I suppose
we shouldn’t”, but Miles, who is an expert at forbidden “intercourses”, continues
“Of course we have the others”, reminding the governess she still has a rival for
his love that she needs to battle before she can make him his, and that she still
has to punish him. Miles flatters the governess, trying to convince her otherwise:
“Yet even though we have them,” he returned, still with his hands in his pockets
and planted there in front of me, “they don’t much count, do they?”, but the
governess will not be so easily swayed this time. She senses Miles’s anxiety: “I
felt that I saw him, at any rate, shut in or shut out. He was admirable, but not
comfortable: I took it in with a throb of hope. Wasn’t he looking, through the
haunted pane, for something he couldn’t see?—and wasn’t it the first time in the
whole business that he had known such a lapse? The first, the very first: I found
it a splendid portent. It made him anxious, though he watched himself; he had
been anxious all day and, even while in his usual sweet little manner he sat at
table, had needed all his small strange genius to give it a gloss. When he at last
turned round to meet me, it was almost as if this genius had succumbed”, Miles
is betraying himself, pronouncing words with venom while trying to keep up the
flirtation: “He stood there smiling; then at last he put into two words—“Do
you?”—more discrimination than I had ever heard two words contain. Before I
had time to deal with that, however, he continued as if with the sense that this
was an impertinence to be softened. “Nothing could be more charming than the
way you take it, for of course if we’re alone together now it’s you that are alone
most. But I hope,” he threw in, “you don’t particularly mind!” “Having to do
with you?” I asked. “My dear child, how can I help minding? Though I’ve
renounced all claim to your company,—you’re so beyond me,—I at least greatly
enjoy it. What else should I stay on for?”, but Miles too understands that the
governess kindness at this moment has its root in her desire for something back:
“He looked at me more directly, and the expression of his face, graver now,
struck me as the most beautiful I had ever found in it. “You stay on just for
that?” “Certainly. I stay on as your friend and from the tremendous interest I
take in you till something can be done for you that may be more worth your
while. That needn’t surprise you.” My voice trembled so that I felt it impossible
to suppress the shake. “Don’t you remember how I told you, when I came and sat
on your bed the night of the storm, that there was nothing in the world I wouldn’t
do for you?” “Yes, yes!” He, on his side, more and more visibly nervous, had a
tone to master; but he was so much more successful than I that, laughing out
through his gravity, he could pretend we were pleasantly jesting. “Only that, I
think, was to get me to do something for you!”, but for the governess, him
knowing that information does not change anything. She is determined to
reclaim her power as an adult and she is going to do it, in the fullest sense, by
killing him, but not before she has made Miles tell her his dirty little stories from
school. Miles recognizes in it a sexualized interest: “It was partly to get you to
do something,” I conceded. “But, you know, you didn’t do it.” “Oh, yes,” he said
with the brightest superficial eagerness, “you wanted me to tell you something.”
“That’s it. Out, straight out. What you have on your mind, you know.” “Ah, then,
is that what you’ve stayed over for?”. Like a pedophile, she bribes a child with
kindness to receive sexual satisfaction, even if that satisfaction does not come
from direct sexual contact. “He spoke with a gaiety through which I could still
catch the finest little quiver of resentful passion; but I can’t begin to express the
effect upon me of an implication of surrender even so faint. It was as if what I
had yearned for had come at last only to astonish me. “Well, yes—I may as well
make a clean breast of it. It was precisely for that.” He waited so long that I
supposed it for the purpose of repudiating the assumption on which my action
had been founded; but what he finally said was: “Do you mean now— here?”,
the governess candidly admits her motives, while Miles is now cast in a more
normative position, as he is trying to watch his words around an adult. It appears
that the “dear” governess doesn’t want to play anymore. She wants to make him
afraid: “There couldn’t be a better place or time.” He looked round him uneasily,
and I had the rare—oh, the queer!— impression of the very first symptom I had
seen in him of the approach of immediate fear. It was as if he were suddenly
afraid of me—which struck me indeed as perhaps the best thing to make him. Yet
in the very pang of the effort I felt it vain to try sternness, and I heard myself the
next instant so gentle as to be almost grotesque. “You want so to go out again?”,
but she cannot help speaking gently as well, as fear, which is so normal in other
children, seems almost out of place, literally “queer”, in Miles, which makes it
an even bigger triumph for her. Miles is in pain even, but still trying to maintain
composure, fighting for his life: “Awfully!” He smiled at me heroically, and the
touching little bravery of it was enhanced by his actually flushing with pain. He
had picked up his hat, which he had brought in, and stood twirling it in a way
that gave me, even as I was just nearly reaching port, a perverse horror of what
I was doing. To do it in any way was an act of violence, for what did it consist of
but the obtrusion of the idea of grossness and guilt on a small helpless creature
who had been for me a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse?”,
the governess’s attraction to Miles is again trying to undermine her agency and
power, by making her reflect on whether she really should intrude “grossness
and guilt” in Miles’s mind, the child who revealed to her “the possibilities of
beautiful intercourse”, of queer intercourse: “Wasn’t it base to create for a being
so exquisite a mere alien awkwardness? I suppose I now read into our situation
a clearness it couldn’t have had at the time, for I seem to see our poor eyes
already lighted with some spark of a prevision of the anguish that was to come.
So we circled about, with terrors and scruples, like fighters not daring to close.
But it was for each other we feared!”. Miles almost pleads: “That kept us a little
longer suspended and unbruised. “I’ll tell you everything,” Miles said—“I mean
I’ll tell you anything you like. You’ll stay on with me, and we shall both be all
right and I will tell you—I will. But not now”, Miles even says he will tell her
“anything she likes”, a very revelatory passage, as Miles voices the fact that he
knows of the governess’s interest being prurient and that he will try to tell a story
that will be built upon satisfying her interest, rather than on the truth of what
happened, so that he can be left alone. “I had not yet reduced him to quite so
vulgar a lie, and I felt proportionately ashamed. But, horrible as it was, his lies
made up my truth”, the governess says when Miles lies so that he can get out of
the situation. The governess then asks him to satisfy a “smaller request”, to
confess that he took the letter. But Quint, she tells us, just appeared at the
window: “My sense of how he received this suffered for a minute from something
that I can describe only as a fierce split of my attention—a stroke that at first, as
I sprang straight up, reduced me to the mere blind movement of getting hold of
him, drawing him close, and, while I just fell for support against the nearest
piece of furniture, instinctively keeping him with his back to the window. The
appearance was full upon us that I had already had to deal with here: Peter
Quint had come into view like a sentinel before a prison. The next thing I saw
was that, from outside, he had reached the window, and then I knew that, close to
the glass and glaring in through it, he offered once more to the room his white
face of damnation”. She is determined of not making Miles realize her rival, his
lover, has appeared: “It came to me in the very horror of the immediate presence
that the act would be, seeing and facing what I saw and faced, to keep the boy
himself unaware”, to keep children “unaware”, an important goal the governess
sets herself in the novel that she keeps failing at reaching, is the goal of most
adults, in Victorian society and in our contemporary society. We see the
moments we give children knowledge, even when it is still knowledge mediated
by adults, as moments of loss. We see children discovering knowledge on their
own as not only an even greater loss, but as potentially very dangerous. “It was
like fighting with a demon for a human soul, and when I had fairly so appraised
it I saw how the human soul—held out, in the tremor of my hands, at arm’s
length—had a perfect dew of sweat on a lovely childish forehead”, as I pointed
out, because “it was like” is not the same as “it was”, they are not fighting for a
soul but for the sexual possession of a body. Quint and the governess might be
fighting - but they are almost the same. Miles admits he took the letter, and the
governess responds with an almost erotic expression of joy: “At this, with a
moan of joy, I enfolded, I drew him close; and while I held him to my breast,
where I could feel in the sudden fever of his little body the tremendous pulse of
his little heart, I kept my eyes on the thing at the window and saw it move and
shift its posture”, we are reading that Miles id dying, that the governess if
frightening him, killing him, “the sudden fever of his little body”, “the
tremendous pulse of his little heart”, but we are too focused on the fight between
her and Quint to realize it. “I have likened it to a sentinel, but its slow wheel, for
a moment, was rather the prowl of a baffled beast”, this portrayal of Quint as
animalistic we have also seen when he was described as “hungrily hovering” for
Miles. The governess tells us “Meanwhile the glare of the face was again at the
window, the scoundrel fixed as if to watch and wait. It was the very confidence
that I might now defy him, as well as the positive certitude, by this time, of the
child’s unconsciousness, that made me go on”. Miles admits the theft of the
letter. The governess sees in Miles’s uneasiness, in the fact that at this moment
she knows more than him, having spent most of the novel knowing less as a
reaffirmation of the rights she is entitled to as an adult. We see her coercion
coupled with affectionate gestures, embodying motherhood: “I kissed his
forehead; it was drenched. “So what have you done with it?”. She sees his
admission of having burnt the letter as an opportunity to start her questioning of
his behavior at school. Miles is outraged that the governess even dared to
suggest that he stole: “Did you take letters?—or other things?”“Other things?”
He appeared now to be thinking of something far off and that reached him only
through the pressure of his anxiety. Yet it did reach him. “Did I steal?” I felt
myself redden to the roots of my hair as well as wonder if it were more strange to
put to a gentleman such a question or to see him take it with allowances that
gave the very distance of his fall in the world. “Was it for that you mightn’t go
back?””, as I’ve mentioned the defining of Miles as a “gentleman” as she starts
questioning what is clearly coded as sodomitical behavior would have reminded
the public of the time of the Wilde trial, where intergenerationality also played
an important part, with Wilde famously declaring, and being received with an
applause: “The Love that dare not speak its name" in this century is such a great
affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and
Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you
find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual
affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of
art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine,
such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that
it may be described as the "Love that dare not speak its name," and on account
of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of
affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly
exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect,
and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it
should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and
sometimes puts one in the pillory for it”[168]. But because Oscar Wilde loved
men as well as boys (and to a lesser extent, women), and most of the other
notable homosexual figures of the time, like Symonds, did not desire boys but
virile young men, their paradigm easily fits Miles, who would have not been
perceived as a victim by most people. This also highlights as I mentioned the
fact that Miles, being not just a boy but a boy with no future, cannot perform
manhood without queering it. “The only thing he felt was rather a dreary little
surprise. “Did you know I mightn’t go back?” “I know everything.” He gave me
at this the longest and strangest look. “Everything?” , the governess is trying to
reestablish the normative hierarchies of relations between adults and children,
but the fact that an adult needs to prove a child their knowledge already stands
outside normativity. Miles confirms what the governess already knew, he did not
steal, and finally confesses the truth about his wretched schooldays: “What then
did you do?” He looked in vague pain all round the top of the room and drew his
breath, two or three times over, as if with difficulty. He might have been standing
at the bottom of the sea and raising his eyes to some faint green twilight. “Well—
I said things.” “Only that?”“They thought it was enough!”“To turn you out
for?”Never, truly, had a person “turned out” shown so little to explain it as this
little person! He appeared to weigh my question, but in a manner quite detached
and almost helpless. “Well, I suppose I oughtn’t”, the governess already seems
more puzzled and less confident than before. “I said things”, he told her,
positioning himself as an agentive subject, rather than as someone who is acted
upon. “But to whom did you say them?” He evidently tried to remember, but it
dropped—he had lost it. “I don’t know!” He almost smiled at me in the
desolation of his surrender, which was indeed practically, by this time, so
complete that I ought to have left it there. But I was infatuated—I was blind with
victory, though even then the very effect that was to have brought him so much
nearer was already that of added separation. “Was it to everyone?” I asked.
“No; it was only to—” But he gave a sick little headshake. “I don’t remember
their names.” “Were they then so many?”“No—only a few. Those I liked”, the
last line is the one that will puzzle the governess more, the final proof of Miles’s
unredeemable perversity, the final proof that a child like this does not deserve
the privilege of manhood, that a child like this could never be a man.“Those he
liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within
a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his
being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if
he were innocent, what then on earth was I?”, the idea that Miles said things to
those he liked, not that the ones that liked him said things to him or even that he
said things to the ones that liked him, is so absurd, and so different from the
governess’s dreams of sexual assaults, that it might even be a sign of innocence,
but it’s actually the deepest abyss of perversion. And as I had previously noted,
like a true pedophile she speaks: “If he were innocent, what then on earth was
I?”. The governess feels that her constant demand for details of actions she
already somehow had the knowledge of does not imperil her innocence, it is to
protect the children, the same children who will never be as innocent as she is
and who she feels are corrupting her from the very beginning. “Paralysed, while
it lasted, by the mere brush of the question, I let him go a little, so that, with a
deep-drawn sigh, he turned away from me again; which, as he faced toward the
clear window, I suffered, feeling that I had nothing now there to keep him from”,
Miles realizes Quint’s presence, in the same moment that the governess realizes
that yes, she knows less (is more innocent) than Miles. “He was soon at some
distance from me, still breathing hard and again with the air, though now
without anger for it, of being confined against his will. Once more, as he had
done before, he looked up at the dim day as if, of what had hitherto sustained
him, nothing was left but an unspeakable anxiety. “Oh, yes,” he nevertheless
replied—“they must have repeated them. To those they liked,” he added”, Miles
seems to be almost giving up, but he is not ceasing to frustrate the governess,
who wanted to hear different things and much more: “There was, somehow, less
of it than I had expected; but I turned it over. “And these things came round
—?”, despite the meaning being unambiguous, it is less than what she expected,
because she never wanted to hear the truth - as Miles had said, she wanted to
hear what she would have liked. “There was, somehow, less of it than I had
expected; but I turned it over. “And these things came round—?” “To the
masters? Oh, yes!” he answered very simply. “But I didn’t know they’d tell.”
“The masters? They didn’t—they’ve never told. That’s why I ask you.” He turned
to me again his little beautiful fevered face. “Yes, it was too bad.” “Too bad?”
“What I suppose I sometimes said. To write home.” I can’t name the exquisite
pathos of the contradiction given to such a speech by such a speaker; I only
know that the next instant I heard myself throw off with homely force: “Stuff and
nonsense!” But the next after that I must have sounded stern enough. “What
were these things?”, Miles is feeling unwell, he is fevered, and has pretty much
revealed all there was to reveal about his behavior at school, except shat the
governess really wanted to know, “what these things were”. “My sternness was
all for his judge, his executioner; yet it made him avert himself again, and that
movement made me, with a single bound and an irrepressible cry, spring straight
upon him. For there again, against the glass, as if to blight his confession and
stay his answer, was the hideous author of our woe—the white face of
damnation”, to stop Miles revealing all, Quint manifests himself, which again
codes the relationship between them as pedophilic in a stereotypical sense, with
Quint anxiously trying to prevent Miles from spilling sexual secrets to “trusted
adults”, but despite that, while Quint might be “the hideous author of their woe”,
Miles’s punishment is still death. Then Miles’s says something puzzling in his
pain and confusion, “No more, no more, no more!” I shrieked, as I tried to press
him against me, to my visitant. “Is she here?” Miles panted as he caught with
his sealed eyes the direction of my words. Then as his strange “she” staggered
me and, with a gasp, I echoed it, “Miss Jessel, Miss Jessel!” he with a sudden
fury gave me back”, Miles never had any previous connection with Miss Jessel,
so his use of feminine pronouns could be an attempt at leading the governess
astray, or a sign of his less than lucid state, of his imminent death. The way this
last scene develops is telling: “It’s not Miss Jessel! But it’ s at the window—
straight before us. It’ s there—the coward horror, there for the last time!” At this,
after a second in which his head made the movement of a baffled dog’s on a
scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a
white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly, though
it now, to my sense, filled the room like the taste of poison, the wide,
overwhelming presence. “It’s he?”, after the governess has informed Miles it’s
not Miss Jessel, Miles’s head “makes the move of a baffled dog’s on a scent”, a
sexualized metaphor. It is also signaled in the scene that Miles is angry at the
governess. His “It’s he?” sounds more like a plead for reunion with a lover
(Oates’s interpretation) than an expression of terror. And yet: “I was so
determined to have all my proof that I flashed into ice to challenge him. “Whom
do you mean by ‘he’?” “Peter Quint—you devil!”, the governess sees “you
devil” as being directed at Quint, not at her, and yet there are Italian editions
where the word “devil” (demonio) is replaced by the word “witch” (strega)[168].
There is a still a lot of debate centering this line, and at whom it is directed[169].
To me, the most likely candidate seems to be the governess. Especially because
it is immediately followed by: "His face gave again, round the room, its
convulsed supplication. “Where?”,, the governess herself calls what he says a
“supplication”, the implication here being that the jealous governess is
preventing him from reaching her rival, that Miles prefers. As I point out, her
talk immediately after is that of a jealous lover: “They are in my ears still, his
supreme surrender of the name and his tribute to my devotion. “What does he
matter now, my own?—what will he ever matter? I have you,” I launched at the
beast, “but he has lost you for ever!” Then, for the demonstration of my work,
“There, there!” I said to Miles”. This makes the punishment inherently flawed.
It seems that the governess is not “saved” now that Miles is about to be declared
dead. It seems that Miles’s killing was accomplished not to punish the bad child,
but to keep the bad child all to herself, and to keep him a child, not because he
does not deserve to become a man, but because her beloved Miles should not
turn into something so mediocre. In this reading, she did not so much kill the
queer child as she kept him alive. So that he will never stop, like Quint and
Jessel, inhabiting the house of Bly and terrifying good, respectable adults.
Miles’s future was becoming like his uncle, a future he never denied he wanted -
in the governess’s mind, he does not deserve that because unlike how his uncle
probably was as a child, he is not a good boy. But why the assumption that the
governess sees something that she tried so hard to avoid until the very end as
something positive? It would be a real shame indeed to see a boy like Miles
become a man. He still terrifies us, and in a sexual sense, as we see in modern
adaptations of The Turn. Knowing that he would have become a properly
socialized gendered adult would have took much of the fear and fascination
away from this mysterious character, one of the most challenging depictions of
children in 19th century fiction. “But he had already jerked straight round,
stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was
so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp
with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I
caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the
end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with
the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped”, the governess has
“caught” Miles, and she is determined to never let him go, to never lose him to
normalcy while also never losing the pretense of being “normal” herself.

A lot of the subtext we saw in The Turn Of The Screw (1898) is rendered even
more explicit in the opera adaptation by Benjamin Britten. The next section will
focus on the opera, and particularly on the Glyndebourne and Festival D’Aix
productions, as well as on some other less known ones. It will be mainly an
examination of what we see on stage in the productions and of the libretto, rather
than of the musical content, on which various analyses are already present, as it
falls outside my field of study. It will also focus on Britten’s childhood and on
the important associations he had with boys in his adult life, as well as his
probably never fully actualized pedophilia.

Benjamin Britten’s “The Turn Of The Screw”:

Britten and The Boys:
There has been a lot of talk of the subject of Benjamin Britten and boyhood,
including a specialistic study by John Bridcut and a documentary with the same
name: “Britten’s Children”, which is immensely informative. The press too,
during Britten’s centenary broached the topic, a 2012 The Guardian article
written by Martin Kettle called “Why we must talk about Britten’s boys”,[1]
analyzes why, after important sexual abuse scandals like that of Savile “we
cannot ignore his obsession with children”. Definitely the month before Kettle’s
article the ever sensationalistic Daily Mail published one where Britten and
Savile were deliberately accosted, side by side in the picture[2]. Britten’s fans did
not react positively to those articles, some deciding to literally ignore those
assertions, despite the fact that, as Berkeley tells us, not only the Britten’s
attraction to children existed, but it was good that it did: “We have to be grateful
that it was there, because we have a series of masterpieces as a result”[3]. A
Guardian commentator writes: “Well, how about the BBC just play the music”[4].
Other commentators mentioned other important artists from the past who they
think would be unfairly targeted by modern media hysteria: “We have it on good
authority that Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about a young boy - let’s have him in
the sights next week”[5], with another one yet replying by quoting a famous
sonnet by Shakespeare and adding “Can’t see Savile writing this - can you?”[6].
Some commentators were even claiming that sexual(ized) contact between
children/adolescents and adults isn’t always harmful, based on their personal
experiences[7]. There is an important difference between how these behaviors are
received when coming from a person who famously positively contributed to
society as opposed to faceless monstrous strangers whose “grooming”
accusations do not comprise actions wholly different from Britten’s behavior.
Unsurprisingly, there is a lot more rationality from people when the supposed
pedophile is portrayed as a human being. When this “pedophile” is elevated to a
godlike status, rationality can even turn into venom towards people who might
have been genuinely victimized, as we can see from Michael Jackson’s case[8],
the portrayal of the victims by Michael Jackson’s fans is that of authentic child
demons, and even more frequently, of adults who invent sordid, titillating stories
(some people’s reception of “Leaving Neverland” was one of a sort of
recognition of “erotic innocence”, but more than that a reinforcing of the
dangerous stereotype of the “perfect victim”) for monetary gain. But what about
Britten’s actual relationships with boys, what did they comprise and how were
they perceived? We need to start from Britten’s own boyhood, and we can see
that we can make an argument for children navigating their role as sexual
subjects, sexual harassment from adults, and a recognition of their own power
over the people they are constantly portrayed as helpless victims in relation to. In
Britten’s childhood we have seen men like Sewell, a sadistic teacher who was
said to be particularly brutal in his beatings of pupils[9], Britten had a lifelong
horror for physically disciplining children. Sewell was a “God fearing man” who
would have never sexually assaulted a child, despite that, “he did occasionally
indulge in a friendly pat on the bottom…and once felt my bare bottom after a
beating to comfort me”[10]. But despite that, Sewell’s son gives credit to the
possibility of Britten’s claim of having been assaulted even if not by Sewell,
because of “the sort of school South Lodge was in the twenties”[11]. Donald
Mitchell, Britten’s publisher, on the country casts doubt on the claim “Was Ben
fantasizing, perhaps?”[12]. Another claim that was purportedly made by Britten
was that his own father had a sexual attraction to boys, and that he used his son
to find them: “I don’t see how you send your child out to find boys, but I didn’t
pursue it. I don’t think he invented it”[13]. Humphrey Carpenter contends that
both were “fantasies”[14]. Later on, Britten studied with John Ireland, in a period
of decline for the latter’s life. He definitely had an attraction to boys, and the
article “Save me from those suffering boys” in “Benjamin Britten studies” sets
him as part of the Uranian poetic tradition that I have already mentioned[15], once
writing to a correspondent: “so even you are susceptible to the charm of the
costume invented by Baden-Powell […] which is two removes from the
restricted costume of the 1900s - when no legs were visible except bathing and
football”[16]. In fact the article evidences the error of assuming Britten and
Ireland were the only Englishmen “to ever be attracted to boys”, but that the
English fixation with boys could be the subject of whole books in itself, the
tradition including people that were not traditionally conceptualized as sexually
deviant (the article mentions the Earl of Rochester)[17], this makes sense as
Britten's whole life evidences that sexual desire and contact between men and
boys was part of a lot of people’s everyday (sexual) lives. The article would
rather see Britten and Ireland as comrades, but Britten recalled to a friend that he
was disgusted by Ireland’s ways (as I mentioned in that period Ireland’s life was
going downhill), having seen him urinate on the floor while drunk, and that once
Ireland had made an unwanted sexual advance on him: “He was most indignant
about it, and harped on it so many times, usually referring to him as a dirty old
man”, Peter Pears, Britten’s lifelong companion, confirmed the story[18]. The
aforementioned article thinks this unlikely, as Ireland was attracted only to boys,
and Britten was a young man at the time. But Britten retained a very boyish face
and figure for longer than most men do, and never fully conformed to hegemonic
masculinity, factors which rendered him susceptible to sexual pursuit by men
who usually did not desire other men. The amount of lies, following a scheme
that immediately casts doubt on what Britten said about his boyhood, seems to
be a little too inflated, which belies an unwillingness to believe episodes of
sexual coercion who see people who had a respectable image as their
protagonists. Which includes, Britten’s own behavior. When thirteen year old
Harry Morris, in 1937, went to stay at Britten’s in Cornwall, he felt so
intimidated by something Britten had said or done, he flung a chair at him[19].
Regarding this episode, Britten’s biographers tend to believe Morris had
misunderstood the situation, or that he exaggerated.[20] It probably wouldn’t have
been perceived the same way had the man not been Britten. Despite that, Britten
seems to not have been a predatory man in general in relation to the young
people he was clearly infatuated by, even if there are other incidents of children
or young adolescents who apparently did not feel at ease around him, we read,
“A friend of mine had two teen-aged sons, whom Britten made much of: both,
after visits to his house, refused to go there again and they would have nothing
more to do with him. The same thing happened in the case of her nephews”[21].
But most boys who knew Britten had with him experiences that, while they
would be classified as “grooming” today, were after all, not coercive. And yet
several of them reportedly experienced harassment from other men or older
youths. Let’s take for example David Spenser, he was raised by a single mother
who was struggling financially and who was “aware her sons were not
unattractive”, and would have sold them to the “nearest bidder”[22], because he
had no father, he says, he had sexual knowledge imparted to him (and his
brother) “by ever well meaning male his mother came across”[23], he tells us he
had an “odd naughty parish priest” who some times had “gone a little too far”
with him[24], but does not consider his experiences to have been traumatic or
even out of the ordinary: “I mean, nobody ever did anything disastrous: I never
lost my virginity or anything. But certain people’s hands were exploratory, and
you had to say, “Please sir, I don’t like that”. But I can’t truly remember having
to say that to Ben”[25], of course, whether there was penetration (“never lost my
virginity”) is what determines the difference between the ordinary experiences of
children and young adolescents and “sexual abuse”, or at least used to determine.
The fact that he never felt unsafe with Britten does not mean that Britten’s
conduct would have been considered proper today, the level of physical affection
there was between him and Spenser is not only considered “inappropriate”
between unrelated adults and children, but also atypical of the average father-
child bond. It rather mirrors a romantic relationship, even if a very chaste one.
The difference is that this contact was welcomed by Spenser, and even felt
“protective”.[26] In fact, when Spenser told Britten, apparently feeling
comfortable enough to do so, that a man had made unwanted sexual advances to
him on a bus, he: “Was very protective, and very concerned that this should have
happened to me. I remember that particular night was one when he came and sat
on my bed and kissed me. It was as though as he didn’t want to have “Little
David” - if that’s what he called me - to have to experience that kind of thing. So
I think that innocence was very important to him”[27], while here, the child’s
capability of distinguishing what feels right to them (Britten’s kisses) and what
doesn’t (Frightening sexual advances from a stranger on public transports, the
lustful look, that Ben never got, of an old actor who also used to kiss him[28]), is
valued, it’s still the construct of innocence, which it has been explored how
much mattered to Britten in every sense, and soon we will se this included in a
paradoxically sexual sense as well, which is at stake, not the fact that the boy did
not want it. As I’ve said, Spenser wasn’t the only “Britten’s boy” with those
experiences, predictably. One of Britten's earliest boy friends was Piers
Dunkerley, he too felt safe confessing Britten unpleasant episodes, like the
harassment he experienced at school, Britten wrote, “Bloxham seems a queer
school”, “It makes one sick that they can’t leave a nice lad like Piers alone - but
it’s understandable - good heavens!”, the comment he made on Bloxham might
be reflective of the fact that his brother Tony also had experienced predatory
sexual approaches from masters there, according to his wife.[29] His remark on
how it is understandable that a boy like Dunkerley might be subjected to this
type of situations might seem uncomfortable to us, but Dunkerley’s willingness
to confide in Britten belies a generally supportive attitude, unless we don’t
undermine Dunkerley’s capability of selecting people he can trust. Even the most
important out of all Britten’s boys, and probably the most sexually precocious
one, David Hemmings, the first Miles which we will later discuss at greater
length, recalled an unwanted sexual advance from a stranger on a London bus,
an experience he considered as even somehow useful, as he said it helped him
recognize sexual advances[30]. Britten’s attractions were fundamentally towards
boys, the only adult he felt romantic and sexual desire for was Pears, Mitchell
tells us: “Ben’s own highly charged feelings about very young males was
something that could not find fulfillment, and that, paradoxically, in a way that
may have helped to keep the other (and more important) relationship stable. It
wasn’t as if he was interested in other men”[31], in a way, Pears was to him what
Britten might have wanted to be to boys, it has been stressed that Britten has
always, in a way, remained a boy, and Pears filled the adult’s role, the
significance of the disruption of age roles on Britten’s part and his participance
in a queer relationship echoing the view of the homosexual as a man who has
refused to develop into “normal”, “adult” heterosexuality, and echoing
ideologies surrounding homosexual relationships that see one of the partners cast
in a traditionally male role and the other one in a feminine or childish one, but
also other more potentially emancipatory models. John Evans, after Britten’s
death, was told by Pears that Britten had: “needed the active figure (Peter) to his
passive, but he also needed to be active to a boy’s passive”[32], and added “And
I’ve always had the impression that Peter meant that both types of relationship
had been consummated - which left me thunderstruck”[33]. Sometimes he
remarked on girls. Britten’s affection for girls as well as boys is often invoked in
an exculpatory fashion to prove his innocence, he himself, after specifying his
love for Dunkerley was not sexual in nature, wrote: “…I am getting to such a
condition that I am lost without some children (of either sex)”,[34]. During a
vacation in 1936, he tells us “Jennifer (aged 6)” was his “especial friend”,
Dunkerley’s sister, Daphne, twelve, was “very nice”, he remained enchanted by
one of Lewis Carrol’s books[35], and almost openly admitted a sexual fascination
for one of the performances of one of the most famous erotic children, Shirley
Temple: “Life is a pretty hefty struggle these days - sexually as well”, “In the
evening Mum and I go to see Shirley Temple in the Little Colonel in Walton with
Mrs Forster. Very entertaining little star-vehicle. Certainly she’s an attractive
little girl - but then, children—-!”[36]. Despite that, we see from Duncan’s sister
and other girls as well, some sort of sadness for the fact that they were often left
behind, and girlhood still did not interest him much,[37] but surely these remarks
are no different than him saying Sophie Wyss’s twelve year old son was a
“special pet of his”, his appreciation for Carrol’s book no different than his
appreciation for “Little White Bird”, the erotic qualities he found in Temple’s
movie were probably very similar to the ones he found in the many movies he
watched about boys, most importantly “Emil And The Detectives” (1931)[38],
after all, he was most likely lying when he claimed that he felt no sexual desires
for Piers Dunkerley. Britten also valued innocence incommensurably, this is
evidenced by his music, where the concept of innocence is central. His “The
Turn Of The Screw” might be the one opera where this concept is more
thoroughly explored. Most of his operas actually seem to deal with innocence in
(sexual) peril. And I note, not just that of children, but also that of adults, that of
adults threatened by children, we can think of his last opera, which Pears called
“evil”[39], “Death In Venice”. Britten’s admirers but also those who knew him in
fact highly doubt that Britten’s desire for boys ever expressed itself through
sexual contact with one because if he valued innocence so much, how could he
forgive himself for being responsible for its demise even in just one child?[40]
But that the desire for innocence easily turns into the desire for children is well
known. Auden tells us that Britten’s desires were for “thin as a board juveniles”,
for the “sexless and innocent”[41], in direct contrast with the “…20 nude females,
fat, hairy, unprepossessing; smelling of vile cheap scent” he saw in a Parisian
brothel and found “revolting”[42], the desirable quality of thinness over fatness,
of hairlessness over hairiness, of coy childish (a)sexuality over aggressive adult
female sexuality and the subsequent disgust felt at those traits are extremely
frequent in accounts from pedophiles. But there is something that doesn’t quite
fit. A lot of “Britten’s boys” just did not fit a model of “sexlessness and
innocence”. This doesn’t go just for the impish David Hemmings (one of the
most important Britten’s boys), for whom the model of childish naughtiness,
even sexual naughtiness (somehow conceptualized as a form of asexuality),
which is often condoned for at least boys and fits a model of childhood
“innocence”, as the “bad” boy is as much as an adult fantasy as the “good” boy
is, because the principal feature of the “bad” boy is that he is never really bad, at
least not in a way that threatens adults, particularly men, collided with real
wickedness. It was one thing for David to play with little girls, quite another for
him to play with men. Hemmings, as we said, and we will examine this further,
was the first Miles, Mrs.Grose in the libretto tells the governess, echoing words
from the book: “A boy is no boy for me who’s never wild. But bad, no, no!”, in
short, a “boy” is not a “boy” if he is not wild, but also a “boy” is not a “boy” if
he is really bad. We’ve seen and we will see extensively how in “The Turn” as
well the blurring of lines between the “bad” boy and the “wicked” child is a site
of danger and adult anxiety. Kidd’s study, which is all about the adult (male)
celebration of the feral boy, which often assumed erotic tinges, cites examples
showing how clear the delineation between the acceptably “bad” child and the
child psychopath was[43], even if he does not explicitly comment on that, this and
other omissions leave the study lacking in several aspects. An example of
Hemmings’s way of acting that resides in this liminal space is that time when he,
“frightened”, went sleeping into Britten’s bed.[44] Now, this performance of
childhood vulnerability is a bit exaggerated for what was in fact a teenager,
rather than a prepubescent boy. For most teenagers, who are constructing their
identities as “future men”, setting themselves apart from prepubescents, “little
boys”, is crucial. Of course, some do later than others, and it depends a lot on the
people they are relating to (es.their mother vis à vis men in position of authority).
But David Hemmings was widely recognized as very precocious. His early, so
early it was problematized, involvement with girls and young women allowed
the people around him to imagine that his behavior might be more similar to that
of a man rather than that of a boy. Easily, while this performance of childishness
might seem sweet and endearing in a boy of nine or ten, even if it might allow us
to fear for him, and to construe the perfect pedophilic scenario of the
unknowing, extremely vulnerable, naive child falling into a pedophile’s hands
unwittingly, it assumes an uncanny, even “creepy” character in a boy almost
fifteen, particularly one who usually behaved as Hemmings did. We start fearing
for Britten, rather than for Hemmings. Of what people would assume about him,
of how he could have reacted if Hemmings had “tried anything”, even how he
could have fended off his advances, rather than the other way around. Hemmings
always stressed he was perfectly aware of Britten being sexually attracted to
him[45], and this behavior seems like a provocation on his part, even if at the time
it might have been just a curiosity to see how much he could provoke him until
he lost control, which he never did, as he was, as so many of them including
David said, a “gentleman”[46]. David Hemmings seems now clearly to not have
been attracted to Britten, but the signals he sent Britten at the time were clearly
confusing, if not downright positive. His behavior recalls that of Miles in “The
Turn Of The Screw” in relation to the governess, who, knowing that she had a
pretty obvious attraction to him, sadistically provoked her despite what seemed
to be a disinterest on his part. Hemmings was in substance the perfect Miles, as
he himself said: “Did I know Miles? Yes, I did. He was me. And I think Ben saw
that in me. He saw the wickedness in me, he saw that evil sense of countenance
about me. He thought I was naughty, and that’s why Peter Pears was afraid of
me, because he thought I was naughty too!”[47]. What was Pears afraid of,
exactly? Britten’s affection for him and his affection for boys were clearly of a
different nature, a boy could never replace Pears, and we’ve seen why. He was
probably afraid of Britten not managing to resist the temptation for once, as
Pears has always been terrified of scandal. As we were saying, Hemmings was
not the only one who did not fit that model. Wulff Scherchen, one of Britten’s
favorite boys along David Hemmings, was probably the only boy Britten knew
with whom an actual sexual relationship was consummated, when he was
sixteen. At fourteen, he replied to Britten’s letter, saying: “I was in shorts and
sandals (as I am now) and it started to rain. I got throughly wet…”[48], The
Guardian comments: “…More experienced boys knew exactly how to write to
Britten to get a result”, “Whether by luck or calculation, or just by calling up in
the composer’s mind the image of a wet 14 year old, Scherchen could effortlessly
hit the note to get a response from Britten”[49]. We see Scherchen, a married man
with a large number of children and grandchildren, in Bridcut’s documentary,
recalling the times spent with Britten with a lot of emotion and nostalgia, but
despite his declarations of love for the composer, he is surprised that he could
have written such romantic declarations to him as an adolescent, after Bridcut
had read him a letter from the time he nonchalantly asked: “That’s what he
said?”, after the correction, he, with an hint of shock, and emphasizing the “I”,
exclaimed: “What I said?”[50]. Despite him not having broken his connection
with his past, the emotional world of the child he was remained somewhat
unknowable to the adult (elderly) Scherchen. Gathorne-Hardy, who struck up a
friendship with Britten as a young adolescent, openly admitted to “flirting” and
“teasing”. He was “at once aware that he attracted him”, and “could not help
flirting slightly”[51], in a similar mode to Scherchen, he once wrote him a
postcard describing how he got “brown all over, even my bottom”, and another
letter describing how he mistakenly asked for chocolate in a tobacconist’s, while
he had “all his fly buttons undone”[52]. After all, Gathorne-Hardy was never coy
about childhood sexuality, and wrote, while discussing Britten: “…Despite this,
it has to be recognised that there are boys of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen who enjoy
sex with older boys and men and actively pursue it”[53]. Apparently he thought
Miles to be one of those, “a male Lolita”.[54] Ronan Magill, one of the very last
boys of Britten’s life, always denied having been attracted to Britten, but wrote
him a striking letter at fifteen which deserves to be quoted at length: “You see,
Ben, when I am with you I am very excited, all of me is excited, - my body - my
hands and my brain - and at the concert I wasn’t excited at all - yes I loved the
music but the person I was with was just a nice, kind, girl. I realised I loved you
very much in a way I don’t quite understand. Please don’t think I am being
disrespectful to you but you have become very important to me, and I seem to
need you very much. I tried to explain this to Mummy this morning but I’d hate
to tell anybody else”[55]. Britten apparently found himself puzzled by such an
erotically charged letter and told Pears: “Tyger has written a very mad letter,
returning the tip I sent him - he is in a strange state, & I’m not sure exactly what
to do with him”[56]. Mitchell reports that this was somehow a frequent problem
for Benjamin: “Once, when Ben and I were talking about one of his young
friends being especially demanding, he said: “It’s often a problem that these
youngsters seem to think I want to go to bed with them”[57], if we have to believe
Magill’s assertion that he did not desire Britten, then he appears even less
innocent to us. Despite how he always portrayed himself, he was unashamedly
pushing Britten to act on his urges for “thin little boys”[57]. When asked if he
knew whether Britten had thought sexually about him and if that offended him
he replied: “If he did, then I’m glad that he did - If I could make him think that
way for even five seconds”[58]. Children do not lack agency in these accounts,
and they do not see adult sexual desire for them as oppressive, quite the
opposite, they see it as a way to gain control of adults to whom they would be
otherwise subjected to. They see it as an exciting possibility. They were also
much less sheltered by adults. How adults saw Britten’s relationships with boys
was complicated. Some parents were in fact worried of what could happen
between him and their sons. Humphrey Maud’s father for instance, forbid his son
to maintain his friendship with the composer[59]. Others, the majority, were far
more lenient. Roger Duncan’s father was not very present, and Roger recalls that
Benjamin was “in many ways what my father wasn’t”[60], his father himself
acknowledged that: “Please give Roger the love he needs”, he once wrote.[61]
Once Britten asked Ronald, the boy’s father, if he could “share” his son, and he
agreed.[62] Roger too was aware Britten’s attraction to him was sexual, and
apparently so did the people around him, including his sister and the classmates
at school who made fun of him for having such a close relationship with Britten
(he was not the only Britten’s boy who was teased for similar reasons, Richard
Kihl, the boy whose Latin homework inspired the latin verses in The Turn Of
The Screw, suffered a similar fate)[63]. Roger Duncan claims he felt no similar
sexual attraction towards Benjamin, even though he appreciated his affection[64],
but when he replaced him with a younger boy, he was wounded, but made a
telling comparison: “But it was as if…someone had a new girlfriend - so
what?”[65]. On the subject of his parents not being concerned with so close an
attachment between their teenage son and an older man, Roger remarks: “I think
my father trusted Ben not to…seduce me, to be straightforward. And my mother
likewise. I was a pretty precocious, articulate person, and if I’d had any
concerns I would have told them, and I didn’t”[66]. His mother’s comments are
very telling: “I wouldn’t have denied Roger the benefit of what Ben could give
him, which was amazing. I mean, to be taken around, and given lovely presents!
I was so fascinated by Ben himself - he was a very fascinating creature - that I
don’t think it occurred to me that anything would go wrong, because I remember
Ronnie saying that he’d behave. And I suppose because we wanted to believe it,
we believed it. But I’ll never know”[67], apparently she lived her desires for
Britten trough her son, as did other mothers, who according to Servaes “used to
throw their sons at Ben”[68]. Other women did not feel the same, Margaret
Ritchie, who played Miss Wordsworth in “Albert Herring”, “made it her job off-
stage as well as on to look after her boy pupil”, Spenser, “and she was horrified
really - he got a lot of attention from Ben”[69]. Spenser remembers Britten telling
him “that certain women had said he was taking advantage of his position”, he
does not recall understanding what he meant at the time[70]. Britten also
remembered the distress he experienced when an homosexual painter he knew
slightly accused him of pedophilia during a dinner[71]. Once, for “Noye’s
Fludde”, several adults began sniggering about the number of boys surrounding
him, when one of his friends exclaimed “Well, now this is Ben’s paradise!”[72],
Britten was profoundly offended, he then later told him “Am I a lecher just
because I enjoy the company of children?”[73]. These are just some of the many
examples that could be made, but they seek to disrupt the notion, evident in
accounts from both former “Britten’s children” and the contemporary admirers
of the composer, of an idealized past where contact between men and children
was not subjected to sexual implications and was considered “pure”[74]. The fact
that the contact was subjected to less moral panic (not sexual implications in
general) and that children, boys in particular, were afforded a greater degree of
freedom, simply means that the idea that sexualized contact between adults and
children, when “real sex” as in penetration was not involved, would traumatize a
child forever had not yet gained the traction it has today. Instead, it was seen as a
“part of the journey to manhood”. Pretty literally, as the contacts only
problematized further as the boys got older. Another former “Britten’s boy”
recalled how he began feeling uneasy over his relationship with the composer
only as he approached manhood, when asked if Britten viewed boys as his
property, he replied: “Yes, I think he might have. But one was just coming to the
age of being one’s own man, and looking for girls oneself, and the thought of
walking down Aldeburgh’s High Street, and somebody saying, “There’s Ben’s
latest” - !”[75]. The implication here is that a man desiring and “owning” another,
sexually developed and knowledgeable man is wrong as it is a violation of his
masculinity, but doing the same to boys might still be acceptable. This is in
direct contrast to contemporary narratives which problematize adult
homosexuality way less.

As I said “The Turn Of The Screw” is one of Benjamin Britten’s operas where
his fixation with innocence and children is more evident. Britten and Pears, who
played Quint, understood very well the sexual implications of the story. For
example, Britten told Piper, the librettist, Pears had asked, in relation to Miles
and Quint’s relationship, to refrain from using “made free [with Miles]” as
opposed to “was too free”, as he thought it would have been “too suggestive”[76].
He then added, “I think the sexy suggestion should only refer to his relationship
with Miss Jessel, don’t you? Incidentally, it may help to avert a scandal in
Venice”[77]. Often, people were concerned that children might catch on the
sexuality of the opera, as they are today, and we will see that.[78] Britten was
obsessed with Hemmings having the role of Miles as he fetishized his character.
When at fifteen, during the tour, Hemming’s voice broke Britten behaved in an
inexplicable manner, getting enraged at him for something he could not control.
That was the end of their friendship, and of course another boy was gotten to
play Miles.[79]. Pears once wrote to Benjamin he envisaged him “in wonderful
hot sunshine in the garden sunbathing & then cooling off in the pool surrounded
by Miles’s and such. Am I quite wrong?”[80]. Colin Graham realized only after a
while that for Britten this was no ordinary ghost story, “…we became aware that
there was more than that - the relationship between Miles and Quint. And the
way Basil [Coleman] was directing it was making that quite clear”[81]. Carpenter
also understands the sexuality of the opera, as he says, Miles “responds
sexually” to Quint’s words, with “his ecstatic sighs”[82]. We will soon explore it
in depth. Carpenter also sees in the opera the specter of coercive sexuality, so
does an article from 2018 entitled “A Ghost Story About Sexual Assault”[83]. This
perspective isn’t rare. I will soon explore why I refute this interpretation.
Britten’s 1954 opera stands today as one of the most important adaptations of
James’s work. It managed to render more explicit the sexual innuendos present
in the book, without dissolving the ambiguity completely (Weigl’s not so well
received[84] 1982’s adaptation, based on the opera, does just that, with what is
almost a sex scene, and with Miles cast as a feminine young man who strongly
exudes sexuality instead of a boy assumingely not to cause scandal, on the
contrary Flora is a child, presumably because her eroticized scenes are only with
females, but she too is very sexualized, being a malicious looking little girl with
a Shirley Temple aura to her), and most modern productions, like those we are
about to see, manage to catch this aspect well.

Causing “A Scandal In Venice”, Or Bringing Pedophiles And Erotic

Children To the Opera:
OperaGlass’s 2020’s production of The Turn Of The Screw, turned into a film
because of the COVID-19 pandemic, unsurprisingly, lacks touch. The fact that
often Quint’s character is shown through a screen, in this interpretation, not only
symbolizes the situation we found ourselves in during this year, but also the
prohibition of adults, particularly men, to establish physical contacts with
children. But Quint not only does not touch Miles, he does not touch his former
lover Miss Jessel too, almost as if he too, was participating in the governess’s
quest to shield her charges from sexual knowledge. This empties the story of its
meaning. As the newspaper The Times remarked: “What they lack [the
characters] is the essential element of Britten’s score: eroticism. Quint isn’t
supposed to bully young Miles into submission, he should seduce him, and
there’s meant to be a suggestion that Quint and Miss Jessel were once
lovers”[85]. To have a major newspaper affirm that there should be more
eroticism between a man and a boy in an opera is something that only Britten’s
works could accomplish. Even in the Monnaie De Munt 2021 version which is
also more focused on Evil in a nonsexual sense, and seems highly detached from
the libretto, eroticized scenes between Miles and Quint and the governess and
Quint do not lack, and the implication of the libretto that Quint replaced Jessel
with Miles is rendered literally. Even minor productions such as the Opera
Columbus 2017 one stress almost excessively this aspect. In the pivotal “At
Night” scene, not only the typical elements of the pedophilic seduction are
present, but Quint piercing Miles with his hobby horse while singing of “the
hero-highwayman plundering the land”, an easy to spot phallic symbolism, is
part of it. To add to his depravity, this Quint also receives Flora in his arms, as
well as Miles, while that should have been Miss Jessel’s role. Very often, we see
don’t see as the location of the “At Night” scene the canonical tower, but instead
an intimate space, like the bathroom or the bedroom, which further eroticizes the
interaction, even if the phallic tower was already an eroticized space. Miles
apparently experiences the scene in a dream in Carrasco’s Opéra de Lyon 2014
version. And it does look like a wet dream. Athanasiou and Hadley argue that:
“The nature of Quint as a dream has been considered one of the more blatant
references to a sexual awakening for Miles, whether real or not”[86]. But now we
are going to focus on two productions in particular, two of the most famous,
Glyndebourne’s (particularily) and Festival D’Aix’s. They have been even more
daring, and examining them will also give us a chance to analyze the textual
content of the libretto in a similar vein to how we analyzed the book.
Glyndebourne’s production decided to have the story take place in the 50s, when
the opera was written, the 50s were a period in England where some of the
Victorian attitudes to child sexuality remained, while others radically changed.
There still wasn’t, as we’ve seen in the section devoted to Britten’s relationships
with boys, the same awareness that there is today about CSA, even though
Landis’s 1956’s study found that 35% of girls and 30% of boys experienced it.
But in the early 50s there was the important change that the previously largely
ignored (as we’ve seen before while discussing the Victorian period, at least by
official discourse) sexual pursuit of boys by men, was put in the spotlight, and if
it did not replace concerns about the “morality” of girls and young women, at
least became subjected to similar anxiety.[87] Those discourses were often
colored by homophobia,[88] and by the fear that a seduced boy will enjoy the
experience and grow up homosexual. The belief that boys should be ardently
protected from such contacts did not mean they were treated well, or any better
than girls who were judged to be too sexual. In a 1953 case before the
Manchester Assizes, six schoolboys were said to be “soliciting men to pick them
up”, and the judge, while trying the man accused of offenses against them,
described them as “repulsive little pests”, and declared that they should be
named to “protect” other adults[89], a reversal of the mainstream politics of
“naming and shaming” the pedophile. Like in the novel, when the governess
(Miah Persson) sees the children (Flora [Joanna Songi], is already more woman
than girl, and seeing her in excessively childish clothes already gives off the
feeling of corrupted innocence, while Miles [Thomas Parfitt] has an extremely
pretty face, but tinged with wickedness and even cruelty. His pale complexion,
flaxen hair and blue eyes here, more than evoking childish purity, seem to evoke
coldness and detachment, “chastity” here is replaced by the sense that he will
evoke deadly lust in the people around him, and then will leave them
unappeased, like the character from Death In Venice) for the first time, she is
surprised by their attractiveness. She seems attracted to Flora, who responds
with a seductive smile, even if more so by Miles, but he doesn’t smile at her at
all, not even when she caresses his face. When Mrs.Grose (Susan Bickley) hands
the governess the letter announcing Miles’s expulsion, her calling her “pretty”
and the longing stare she throws at her seem to suggest erotic desire, however
sublimated. When the governess announces to her that Miles was expelled for
being “an injury to his friends”, Mrs.Grose reacts with shock, and after the
governess asking her if she has known Miles to be bad, she replies: “A boy is no
boy for me who’s never wild, but bad, no!”, the “wildness” of boyhood, even
more in the 50s than in the Victorian era, and insisted upon more in America but
in England as well, was what was supposed to set apart boyhood from both
(white) manhood (rational, controlled) and girlhood (more domestic) but clear
boundaries had to be drawn between, as I already noted, “bad” boys and bad
boys. Those boundaries probably never seemed “clear” to children. Miles here
(as well as in the novel) isn’t even wild, except for some scuffling with his sister
and childish vivaciousness, adding an even more perverse tinge to his expulsion
(also true for the novel, as we’ve seen, the exclusion of non sexual kinds of
misbehavior influences the governess’s anxiety), reflecting the common myth
that children, especially boys but girls too, are up to no good when they’re too
quiet. The news of the expulsion comes in direct contrast with the image of
Miles playing lovingly with his sister under the Christmas tree. After discussing
how “sweet” his games and how “gentle” his looks, they declare with confidence
“Yes! The child is an angel!”. But apparently neither Flora nor Miles are angels,
considering the fact that when Mrs.Grose takes the “liberty” of embracing the
governess, they giggle mockingly, amused at this manifestation of what they
apparently perceive as lesbian desire. After the governess had desired to “see
him”, and “he” appeared but not the “he” she apparently desired, and saw how
well she was doing “his bidding”, in this case Quint’s, so how well she was
executing the task of fostering the queer perversity of these children despite
herself, we are shown an anything but childish performance of “Tom, The
Piper’s Son”, in which Miles, who only lacks leather and a leash, impersonates
Tom, and Flora, the pig. This incestuous BDSM game between children is
reminiscent of other adaptations which show Miles and Flora engaged in
sadomasochistic play in imitation of Quint and Jessel’s sexual behavior, here
there are no suggestions that this behavior was learned, implying that children
can be what is considered “perverse” without any adult’s influence. Of course,
after a similar show, how could Quint not appear? The frightened governess
explains Mrs.Grose what she saw, and she recognizes it’s him. “Dear God, is
there no end to his dreadful ways?”, she sings. The governess, having convinced
Mrs.Grose to speak about what had happened at Bly, receives some interesting
responses. Mrs.Grose tells her, and us, she saw things “she did not like”, “when
Quint was free with everyone, with little Master Miles!”, upon being told of
Quint’s “impropriety” with Miles, the governess is startled, “Miles?”, but it
doesn’t get any more reassuring: “Hours they spent together. Yes, Miss”, the
governess lets out a pained moan “Miles!”. But Mrs.Grose also discusses his
behavior with Miss Jessel, apparently equalizing it with that he had with Miles:
“He made free with her, too, with lovely Miss Jessel, Governess to those pets,
those angels, those innocent babes – and she a lady, so far above him. Dear
God! Is there no end? But he had ways to twist them round his little finger. He
liked them pretty, I can tell you, Miss, and he had his will, morning and night”,
equalizing unproblematically a man’s desire for a preadolescent boy and his
desire for an adult woman, even if of different class, is much more uncanny in
the 50s than it could be in the Victorian era, even if Mrs.Grose is old. “He liked
them pretty” refers to both Jessel and Miles, implying that they’re pretty in the
same way and desirable in the same way. No wonder in one Italian translation of
the libretto for the opera of Parma, it was translated as “Gli piacevano belle”,
“belle” is used to indicate all the persons involved are female.[90] But it is more
commonly translated as “Li adorava entrambi”[91], meaning, “he adored them
both”. This is a more audacious reference than any other in the novel, as is “he
had his will morning and night”. The language of dominance here, “his will”,
and later on as well, would imply Quint assaulted them. But we slowly
discovered they were all eager to submit despite the possibly disastrous
outcomes, in the opera, for Jessel, this includes rejection as well. The governess
is perplexed by the fact that Mrs.Grose seemed to tolerate this behavior, and by
the fact that she did not notify the uncle because “he never liked worries”. But
she cares to remind us, “No, Mr.Quint, I did not like your ways!”. After the
governess has been informed that Quint is in fact dead she remarks: “I know
nothing of these things. Is this sheltered place the wicked world where things
unspoken of can be?”, apparently, yes. “Bad" things have been done here, and
Quint was “impudent, spoiled, depraved”, the idea of this ithyphallic creature
prompts in her selfless fear: “Mrs. Grose, I am afraid, not for me, for Miles. He
came to look for Miles, I’m sure of that, and he will come again”, unrepentant
“depraved" pedophile that he is, he is not contented to have enjoyed Miles’s
complacency in life, he must have him in death too, as in the book. She thunders,
“But I see it now, I must protect the children”, “See what I see, know what I
know, that they may see and know nothing”, this is the mantra of “good” adults.
The lesson scene too, is rife with sexual allusions. Valentine Cunningham, in a
journalistic piece titled “Filthy Britten”, explains the meaning of the latin verses
Miles recites.[92] Britten had taken those words from Kennedy’s victorian
schoolbook that he borrowed from his young friend Richard Kihl, whom he used
to pick up from school with his Rolls, which earned him teasing from his
classmates[93]. It was already a sexual pun in the original schoolbook, because a
lot of those words were slang terms for parts of the male anatomy. When Miles
will repeat them later in the church scene, what we should hear should be: “O
arsehole, scrotum, penis, bless ye the Lord”[94]. Another theme of that scene is
the gender inequality alluded to in the novel as well, as Flora struggles to make
herself seen and heard (Look at me!) by the governess, who privileges Miles’s
education. After that Miles sings the iconic “Malo” theme, which is based on a
rhyme meant to teach boys studying Latin the differences between the Latin
words meaning “I wish”, “apple tree”, “apple”, “adversity” and “evil”. As
Cunningham explains well: “Suddenly, if you know your Latin, you hear this boy
- the object of Quinn’s (sic) apparently dubious attentions and a child who has
been expelled from school for some nameless "sin" - singing that he would
rather be elsewhere, is desirous of otherness, wants not to be labelled a naughty
boy, but is still anxious about "adversity" and being the agent or recipient of ill.
He wants to be up an apple tree, the boy scrumper, a minor transgressor we can
all tolerate. But there is also a more dramatic suggestion of a gender-crossed
Eve, the temptress whose apple induced Adam into sexual fall.”[95] Even while
she downplays Miles’s agency in his relationship with Quint, she brings to light
the issue of Miles perceiving himself as having crossed the line between boyish
“good” “badness” and wickedness. He would rather represent that adult fantasy
of boyishness rather than be the human child that he is, with his own desires,
including sexual ones, because that greatly complicates his life in an unfair
world that disenfranchises children and those perceived as “sexual deviants”.
The song worries the governess, she then asks him whether she had taught it to
him or not, and he replies “No, I found it. I like it. Do you?”. After he finishes
singing, he gets closer to the governess, looks confidently into her eyes, and then
tries to caress her face, but she pulls away, frightened, almost as if she believes
she can catch Evil from him. After Flora’s startling performance at the lake, and
the governess’s catching sight for the first time of Miss Jessel (Giselle Allen),
she declares “They’re lost!”, and we come to the most important scene in
Britten’s opera, and the most blatantly sexualized, “At Night”. Here, as I’ve
previously noted, the already symbolic tower is replaced with an intimate space,
in this case, the bathroom. It begins with Peter Quint’s (Toby Spence) famous
seductive calls to Miles, who is taking a bath. Upon hearing Quint’s call, as if
hypnotized by the melismas, he slowly rises, and responds, “I’m here”. Quint’s
role is, of course, sung by a tenor, while Miles’s by a soprano or a treble. The
contrast between what is traditionally considered a “masculine” and a
“feminine” voice, and between Quint’s “active” role as seducer (“Miles…”) and
Miles’s “passive” role as seduced (“I’m here…”), already establishes what I
consider the “other” gender difference: That between men and boys. This was
established in the novel at the beginning, when discussing Quint and Miles’s
respective sexual (mis)behavior. He then slams the door open and starts singing,
of things that, to quote “The Pupil”, could be in a “boy’s book”. The man telling
his adventure stories, made up or not, to the boy, is a frequent trope in media
depicting eroticized man/boy relationships, he does so while getting closer to
Miles. Miles’s replies by repeating his words in awe, as Carpenter writes, he
“responds sexually” to Quint’s words with “ecstatic sighs”.[96] Here we see the
master/servant erotics portrayed in an explicit manner, as Quint, the servant,
assists his “little master” in the bath. Miles is contented to allow Quint to wrap a
towel around his naked body and to play sweetly with him. He is happy to allow
him to pick him up from the bath and to be held in his arms while he sings “In
me secrets, half-formed desires meet”, he is talking about Miles’s (sexual)
“secrets” and about his “half-formed desires”, the confused sexual desires of late
childhood/early adolescence, that are encapsulated by him, his most important
sexual object choice of the time. “I am the hidden life that stirs when the candle
is out”, seems to be a reference to masturbation, which during the Victorian era,
and even if less so in the 50s too, was a veritable moral panic concerning boys’s
sexuality.[97] He is so because Miles’s sexual fantasies, when he masturbates
“when the candle is out” or in the bath, center him. It is now Miles’s turn to
slowly get closer to Quint, while Miss Jessel calls for Flora, in a very different
context. First of all, Flora is not naked, she is simply washing her hair, not
having a bath, second of all, her lines aren’t nearly as seductive as that of Quint.
They seem to indicate a lamentation for what in the opera is Quint’s betrayal of
her for Miles. While this goes on, he keeps singing, “What goes on in your head,
what questions? Ask, for I answer all”, which I suppose to be Miles’s questions
about sexuality. Another crucial difference is that Miles is about to approach
Quint for an erotic embrace, while Flora and Jessel will perpetually remain
separated by a wall of glass, representing the fact that for them the issue of
identification rather than sexual desire is what is at stake. When Miles is
standing in front of Quint, it is Quint who first embraces the boy, but Miles is
eager to be taken into his arms, “What goes on in your dreams? Keep silent!
I know and answer that too!”, this I take to be a reference to Miles’s wet dreams,
as I've noted, the scene is also often made to take place in a bedroom, or in a
dream. As Quint softly caresses his hair, Miles’s singing really becomes almost
orgasmic, as does Quint’s expression. We also see him taking his head in his
hands, and picking him up again, these moments look spontaneous, genuine,
adding to the eroticism. The ghosts flee,
as the governess and Mrs. Grose
hurriedly search for Flora and Miles.
What Miles replies to the governess’s
“What are you doing here?”, is taken by
Carpenter to be guilt about having been
sexually assaulted.[98] But we were not
shown an assault in the scene we have
seen, more like the reunion of two
lovers. How loving that scene is, and
how agentic Miles is, even while letting
himself be seduced, is the reason why
we can’t seriously believe the opera is
about “sexual assault”, at least not in the
traditional sense, even if it is believed all
sexual contacts between those socially
defined as “children” and those socially defined as “adults” must be. Here the
erotics of power differential, in an ambiguous way, between a master and a
servant, and
between a
man and a
boy, where the
boy is the
master and the man is the servant, are on display for all to see. I believe Miles’s
“You see, I am bad, I am bad, aren’t I?”, should not be seen as guilt over having
been assaulted, but rather as guilt over his feelings and desires towards Quint in
particular and sexuality in general. After all, then the governess takes him into
her arms in exactly the same way as Quint, only, her embrace seems suffocating,
not loving, this quality of her character being highlighted, for example, in
Hindley’s misogynistic interpretation, turning the opera in particular as a fight
between the “male role model” (a discourse whose univocal pederasty I've
already pointed out) and the “coddling” mother, the terror of what Mavor
defined as “effeminophobes” in her remarkable “Reading Boyishly”[99], rather
than an affirmation of children’s sexual desires. In the following scene, we
explore more Quint and Jessel’s motives, which generate very different and
complex interpretations. The ghosts explain their motives while watching the
children sleep, an element of their sexualized, pedophilic “creepiness”. The
dialogue “And now what do you seek?” “I seek a friend”, “She is here!”, “No!
Self-deceiver!”, “Ah! Quint, Quint, do you forget?” has been framed by Griggs
as a rejection of Jessel’s (teleiophilic) heterosexual love[100], this is rendered
literally in the Opera Columbus already mentioned 2017 version, where we see
Quint throwing Jessel across the room, discarding her like a broken toy. What
Quint says after is even more menacing: “I seek a friend, obedient to follow
where I lead, slick as a juggler’s mate to catch my thought, proud, curious, agile,
he shall feed my mounting power, then to his bright subservience I’ll expound the
desperate passions of a haunted heart, and in that hour
“The ceremony of innocence is drowned””. Quint here is comparing Jessel to
Miles, who is considered a superior lover because of his obedience and
subservience. The language of violence, or at least of domination, of these lines
is what led most people to describe the relationship as sexually abusive. Miles
should be “proud, curious, agile”, features that were highly valued in upperclass
boys when being “proud” did not mean lacking respect for adults and being
“curious” did not mean inquiring about “adult” topics such as sex, Quint here
fosters Miles’s pride in the sense that he rescues him from being ruled by a
woman (even contemporary sexist moral panics about the lack of male teachers
for boys focus on the importance of having boys be dominated by men, strong,
“masculine” men[101], rather than by women, who are often either characterized
as suffocating like the governess or as not dominant enough, and boys are very
often framed as desiring dominance, where the sexual boundary is drawn is
unclear, in texts like Herzog’s puzzling but extremely influential “Father
Hunger” for example a boy’s need and want for a man’s discipline is explicitly
sexualized), even if he expects him not to be too “proud” to reject his complete
dominance, and also his curiosity, but as opposed to his pride, he fosters it
completely, like we’ve seen. I will not, despite this, reduce Miles to an unwilling
victim, as Rupprecht phrased it, of “a ghostly male power”.[102] It is reductive.
Miles is, in fact, as Brett wrote, a boy who is a “knowing innocent who is caught
between a threatening lover and a stifling mother and for whom adult male
power is as ominous and menacing as it is alluring”[103]. Miss Jessel’s motives
are very different. She wants a “soul to share her woe”, the woe of having been
abandoned by Quint. She wants to drag Flora in the abyss with her, but not
because she desires her, or even loves her, but because she can’t handle the
immensity of her pain all by herself, she needs someone to “share it”, as she
says. What they sing after, is reminiscent of what today is called “grooming
process”: “Day by day the bars we break, break the love that laps them round,
cheat the careful watching eyes, “The ceremony of innocence is drowned””. The
governess, immediately after, sings one of the most representative lines of her
situation, in the book and in the opera: “O innocence, you have corrupted me”.
Innocence corrupts all of us, it makes all of us into pedophiles, fetishists of
children. To this, she also adds: "I know nothing of evil, yet I fear it, I feel it,
worse, imagine it”, “imagining” “evil”, in this context means slowly descending
into it oneself. The church scene follows, where we see a delightful mix of
childish play and wickedness from Miles and Flora, which is bound to confuse
the adults around them. Flora pretends her doll is god, and then that she is
pregnant, in imitation of Miss Jessel’s pregnancy. We already explored the
hidden meanings of the Latin verses. In fact, Mrs.Grose does not seem troubled,
even remarking of how “sweet they are together”. The governess is. She repeats
the words of the novel, “Dear good Mrs. Grose, they are not playing, they are
talking horrors”. Again there is a suspicion cast on “unnatural goodness”, “Why
are they so charming? Why so unnaturally good? I tell you they are not with us,
but with the others”, both in the era
 when the novel was written and
when the opera was made, the idea
that boys who were not sporty or
given to games that required a lot of
energy, behaved in that manner
because masturbation had stripped
them away of all of their childish
forces was a commonly held one.
[104]. A reflective, bookish boy was
thought to be hiding dark sexual
secrets. Probably this type of boy
scared adults because he was
accessing knowledge that was
thought to only belong to them, by
keeping to himself, he was exercising a forbidden independence, subtracting
himself from adult control over his body and mind. Miles is also portrayed as
overly intelligent in both book and
opera, and there was also the belief
that boys who were too intelligent
died young, as he also does.[105] The
game they are playing here does not
take too much physical energy, but by
parodying church rituals, and
containing sexual references, it is both
a manifestation of intelligence and
knowledge on the part of the children,
and forbidden, even if it
 flies over the head of a woman considered “simple” by the governess,
Mrs.Grose. In fact this is the moment where she adds, “I tell you they are not
with us, but with the others”, “With Quint and that woman” and that “They can
destroy them”. As Mrs.Grose and Flora go inside the church, Miles and the
governess stay outside, for the conversation about his school, like in the novel.
When the governess tries to caress him, he is as always reclutant, and turns
away. While in the novel too, he liked to frustrate her pedophilic desires, in this
version of the opera he is even colder, with an almost aristocratic demeanor,
which is complemented by his looks as we noted. But, unlike the novel, he does
not frame his desire to be away from her in a gendered way, he just says “I want
my own kind”, he could be referring to boys as well as girls. This reflects the fact
that in the 50s, where homophobic panics started to gain traction more than they
ever did before, his assertion that it is “unnatural” for him to be with a lady,
could have been seen in a different way. Miles has to choose his words carefully.
But the scene is tinged with a queer aesthetic in itself, the most intimate
moments give a visual impression reminiscent of the butch-femme dynamic
which dominated most lesbian relationships in the 50s[106], recalling Vicinus’s
argument about the importance of boyhood culture to both gay and lesbian
culture, as a state of gender and sexual indeterminacy[107]. She adds at the end,
“It was a challenge! He knows what I know, and dares me to act”, which opens
for more than one interpretation, because it could be seen as a reference to the
secret of her pedophilia and his sexual provocations, and concludes with an
outburst of panic, “I must go away, now, while they are at church; away from
those false little lovely eyes; away from my fears, away from those horrors; away
from this poisoned place; away, away!”, we know the lure of Bly is too strong
for her to go away before eliminating the focus of all evil and temptation. After a
confrontation between her and Miss Jessel, where she reconfirms her right to
possess the children (“They are mine, mine, the children”), she decides to finally
write to the uncle. Then we see Miles, restless in his childish bedroom, singing
the Malo theme. The presence of Quint hovers all over the room, they also seem
to be furtively staring at each other, trying to establish a contact in spite of the
surveillance of the governess, who is about to make her entrance. When asked
what he is thinking about by her, he replies with “of this queer life”, in the 50s,
“queer” had already assumed a different connotation than the one it had in the
Victorian period. Miles also caresses the governess’s hair in this scene, in a quite
sensual way. While he had never allowed her to touch him when she desired, he
is now touching her, and it is her turn to turn away, frightened actually. She
could take pleasure in touching children, but not in being touched by them, it
undermines her adult agency, it’s a role reversal too dangerous to openly admit
to find pleasure in, and yet, she
does in a way, as she did in the
novel. Her arousal is indicated
by the fact that she immediately
after inquires of what happened
before she came, the “mystery”
of Miles’s sexual life before she
came and especially at school is
a sexual obsession of hers in the
opera too. Her forcefully
grabbing his face after the news
of her writing to the uncle did
not have the effect she desired
on Miles (another feature of his
character her, a feature that gives
him power, is his stoicism.
Generally associated with adult
men, we expect children to be as
emotional as possible), is a way
to regain the power that gesture
undermined. So is the way she
restrains him, almost trying to
force him to speak, while he
struggles to remain loyal to his lover (Quint). He manages, and is then
apparently pressured to steal the letter. Quint is present also in the following
scene, where Miles tries to distract the governess and Mrs.Grose to allow Flora
to go outside (and also remain alone with him). The governess in the following
scene believes it is Miss Jessel’s fault that Flora hates her, she is unable to
understand that a child might want to assert their independence, for her there is
only one plausible explanation, they are dependent on another adult, who is
directing them to act that way, a common view among adults in real life too. The
following scene concerning Mrs.Grose taking Flora away contains a very
interesting line: “No, don’t ask me. What that child has poured out in her dreams
– things I never knew nor hope to know, nor dare remember.” “never knew nor
hope to know” and “dare remember” might seem to be in contradiction with
each other, but adults are really socialized in a way to render the child they used
to be unknowable. There is no other explanation to, for example, the number of
adults who consider the mere approximation of children to sexuality outrageous.
The next scene is the last one - Quint’s and the governess’s fight for the
possession of Miles. “O Miles – I cannot bear to lose you. You shall be mine,
and I shall save you”, the governess sings. Here the fight between the
stereotypical smothering mother and the “male role model” is perfectly rendered
visually. This situation is more pertinent to the opera than to the book, because
Britten too often positioned himself as a “male role model” for fatherless boys,
or for boys with bad fathers, and because the literature pertaining to the opera
highlighted this aspect even more. They both were also much more than that.
What Miles is seen to desire is complex. Quint was his lover and his father
figure, the governess was an oppressive “smothering mother” but also, in a way,
a friend, and even though he fiercely resists her, he does with his doubts. In this
scene too, we see Miles retreating in the moments when the governess shows the
greater ardor and desire to touch. There is a moment where he allows her to
touch his hands, after she had asked him what was on his mind, but after he
hears Quint’s calling, he does so as if he’s scared - scared that Quint might
perceive him as already thinking of betraying him. Immediately after he shows
himself, Miles is anxious to reach him, like in the novel, and this is when he
starts to lose all of the power he thought he had gained. But the visual image of
him trying to run towards a man with whom we saw him being extremely
intimate, is even more powerful than anything we could read. Here we can also
hear Quint’s voice, and we couldn’t in the novel. He even tells him, “Miles!
You’re mine!”, twice, this is not him claiming that Miles is his possession and
trying to undermine his agency, as it would be easy to think, but a declaration of
love that
is
supposed
to
persuade
Miles to
remain
loyal to
him, and
to it. In
the
novel,
when
Miles is
asked by the governess why
he stole the letter, he replies
with “to see what you said
about me”, not us, as he says
in the opera. Quint also sings
“Do not betray our secrets!
Beware, beware of her!”. This
is tragic pedophilic love on
stage, as Miles tries to reach
his forsaken lover who is
singing (Suggestively, “when the candle is out, remember Quint!”) to him, and
tries to escape from the embraces of an increasingly herself demonic governess.
As in the novel or even more powerfully, the governess’s masculinity, always
strongly repressed by Victorian gender roles, explodes in this scene, she uses
her brute adult strength to restraint a reluctant child who does not want her. The
ambiguity of the novel over to whom the words “You devil!” were addressed (as
well as the ambiguity over the ghosts were present or not) is dispelled here, even
without context, we see that his head turns towards her. Quint declares, “Ah,
Miles! We have failed! Now I must go. Farewell!”, "Farewell, Miles!
Farewell!”, he too choosing the collective “we”. When the governess realizes
what she is caressing is just a body, she falls to her knees and starts singing
“Malo” while cradling it, Miles’s declaration of love to Quint, as if recognizing
a certain responsibility. The last line is, “What have we done between us?”,
indeed, what? Even when the opera is over and the audience is applauding the
singers, Thomas Parfitt and Toby Spence seem closer than the others, their
chemistry is probably what makes this version so special. Not everyone agrees,
in 2011 an article titled “Is The Turn Of The Screw Safe For Boys To Sing?”
came out in The Times[108], but the interview with Thomas Parfitt is most
interesting. He is not unaware of the erotic overtones of the relationship of his
character with Quint, and adds, “I don’t think he’s been abused”, “Miles can see
what the governess is getting at”, he considers Quint a father figure for Miles,
and believes their relationship to be positive. He also says that while Miles
“doesn’t hate” the governess, he prefers the “exciting life” with Quint. Parfitt
also understands the fact that child agency scares the governess, “he seems
totally in control, and that frightens the governess even more”, probably he also
understood that child agency scared his interviewer too, and that being a man, he
could also be leery, and so he may have toned down his real thoughts especially
about the relationship between Miles and Quint. “Miles is a scary character”,
and indeed being Miles is scary in an adultist society.
Now I will consider, not all, but the pivotal scenes of the Festival D’Aix,
Bondy’s version. They are powerfully erotic. Particularly in its portrayal of
Quint (Marlin Miller), whose physicality is accentuated, he is often seen
shirtless. His masculinity is exaggerated. This is what Miles thinks about “when
the candle is out”. Let’s start with the “At Night” scene. Miles (Gregory Monk)
welcomes Quint at the window, and an elaborate scene of seduction follows.

In a
moment, Quint runs his hands all over Miles’s body, clad only by a nightgown.
Miss Jessel (Marie McLaughlin) puts lipstick on Flora (Nazan Fikre), rendering
her “sexualization” literal. In the meanwhile Quint and Miles are seated in a dark
corner of the room, and seem very intimate. When the governess (Mireille
Delunsch) and Mrs.Grose (Hanna Schaer) enter the room, Quint escapes from
the window, everything is suggestive of
forbidden love. Then there is the most
suggestive of all scenes, not just in this
production, but in any production of
The Turn, at least among those I
watched. It’s also a scene that is not
often eroticized. It’s the scene where
Quint pressures Miles to steal the letter.
Upon seeing it, it looks like they have
just spent the night together, as they are
in the proximity of an unmade bed, and
Quint is shirtless while Miles is in
nights wear. Quint grabs Miles by his
clothes, and pins him to the ground, but
not only with violence,
with eroticism too. He
could be intimidating
him, he could be
(further) seducing him,
or he could be doing
both. Out of context,
certain frames look like
intercourse, and this is
coupled with the
suggestive exhortation to
“Take it!” “Take it!”
“Take it!”. The last
scene is also interesting.
Under the YouTube
comments of the scene,
where some people were
calling the acting “subtle”, a commenter retorted “What's subtle about Miles and
the Governess crawling around on the floor?”[109]. Indeed the fact that the scene
is a fight for the romantic and sexual love of a child is not masked, as Quint gets
between them while he sings “You’re mine!”. In a moment, Quint furtively
kisses Miles’s hand, amid the other effusions that should convince him to escape
from the governess’s grip.
 They start
fighting over him like two children would fight over a toy, until he gets tired and
exclaims the fatal line, “Peter Quint! You devil!”. Here the ambiguity over to
whom this is addressed is maintained. About this version, similar concerns about
the “innocence” and “purity” of the children playing Miles and Flora (especially
Miles), have been expressed. This time, in a forum. The topic was called
“L'innocenza dei bambini che interpretano i ragazzi del Giro di Vite”[110] ("The
innocence of the children who portray the Turn Of The Screw kids”). The author
stresses the fact that his concern is not “moralistic”, but that it is something he
seriously wonders about. When a member asks about what happens in it by
someone who claims to not know the opera, another commenter replies half
jokingly “Mh, childhood homosexuality, an evil psycho governess…And I could
go on”. The author of the post corrects the commenter, it is not “childhood
homosexuality” but a “pedophilia accusation” (Does he seem to understand that
Miles does not desire Quint, or the boys with whom he was accused of behaving
immorally at school with, even if the opera does not include the interesting
revelations about them that the book does?), and the governess is not “evil”,
“just a psycho”. Another commenter says that in his interpretation, Quint does
not behave sexually with Miles, he just leads him towards an undefined “Evil”.
The author of the post says that while this explanation could work for James, he
does not feel that way about Britten’s opera, where he believes the sexual subtext
to be more potent. And then adds that this concern arose because he had recently
watched Bondy’s version. He then writes: “Il punto è che con un Quint possente
e magnifico di Marlin Miller, decisamente discinto e brutale, forse il migliore
Quint insieme a Bostridge che io conosca, il piccolo Miles ha - in questo
spettacolo di Luc Bondy - un atteggiamento succube ma complice. Complice nel
male, ma succube nel sesso, e quando Quint impone a Miles di prendere la
lettera che l'istitutrice ha scritto al tutore, c'è un momento in cui Quint è, con un
larghissimo scamiciato, visibilmente sporco, e con aria depravata gli canta
addosso. L'impatto è fortissimo, la scena rende meglio... ma quel bambino? Non
dico Miles, ma dico il piccolo cantante, Gregory Monk…"[111] (“The point is that
with a powerful and magnificent Quint by Marlin Miller, decidedly discreet and
brutal, perhaps the best Quint together with Bostridge that I know, little Miles
has - in Luc Bondy's show - a submissive but complicit attitude. Accomplice in
evil, but submissive in sex, and when Quint forces Miles to take the letter that
the governess wrote to the guardian, there is a moment when Quint is, in a very
large pinafore, visibly dirty, and with a depraved air, sings to him. The impact is
very strong, the scene is better that way...but that child? I don't mean Miles, but I
mean the little singer, Gregory Monk…). But probably to Gregory Monk, as it
was to Thomas Parfitt, sexuality wasn’t anything shocking. Just like adults are
doing their jobs, so are the kids. But when you’re kid, there will always be
scores of adults worried about you “losing your innocence”, but as Kincaid
famously wrote, “Innocence is a lot like the air in your tires: there's not a lot
you can do with it but lose it.”

Conclusion.
This writing explored Henry James and Britten’s “The Turn Of The Screw”, as
well as exploring the connection between it and other James’s books involving
close relationships between men and boys and Britten’s real life relationships
with many boys of various ages. It has mainly served the purpose of exposing
the thesis that “The Turn Of The Screw” is really about child sexuality, and it
follows the works of Kincaid and other theorists who focused on the
construction of childhood innocence and queering childhood. Sexual interaction
between adults and children in general, and between men and boys (which is
either lost in general discussions about an essentialist concept of
“homosexuality” or completely invisible) in particular, it’s contemporary
society’s greatest taboo, and writing about it is not easy, one often comes across
several problems, if not outright censorship. But the sexual children of The Turn
Of The Screw remain fascinating, otherwise shows like “The Turning” (featuring
Finn Wolfhard, a child actor that was frequently sexualized) or “The Haunting
Of Bly Manor”, loosely based on it, wouldn’t be so popular, even if they often
remove the overtones of pederasty between Miles and Quint. Boys in general
remain fascinating - and the they’re almost never portrayed as wholly pure, but
always on the threshold between innocence and (sexual) knowledge, we fetishize
them everyday, and without guilt, because we project all of it on the
“Pedophile”. It’s time to give fictional depictions of them more complexity, to
start portraying them as fully human. Maybe that will, over time, help us
understand that real children are also fully human.