Abstract
Germaine Buckley considers the evolution of the haunted/haunting child in literary horror, from Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (1898) to contemporary novels by John Harding and Chris Priestley. James founds the child of literary horror as the source of uncanny Otherness. Germaine Buckley reveals that repeated use of the figure of the child in literary, filmic, and televisual horror struggles to move beyond this oppositional construction of the child and to jettison a Freudian concept of the child that positions it as implacably Other to adult subjectivity. However, in their modern reworkings of James’s classic, Harding and Priestley depict the child as a subject with which readers are encouraged to identify, whilst also retaining the child’s potential to disturb and to terrify.
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- 1.
Margarita Georgieva notes that the twentieth-century trope of the murderous child, for example, is the recent manifestation “of a complex characterisation system that authors developed through the centuries, a system which originates from the founding works of gothic.” The Gothic Child (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. x–xi.
- 2.
For an in-depth summary and critique of the “Freudian” interpretation of The Turn of the Screw, see Shoshana Felman’s “Turning the screw of interpretation,” Yale French Studies 55–56 (1977): 94–207. She notes that Edmund Wilson’s 1934 essay, “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” and the suggestion that the novel is a “madness story, a study of a case of neurosis […] hit the critical scene like a bomb” (p. 97).
- 3.
This reference to the attic adds a further critical frame through which to read Florence, recalling the recuperation of Bertha Mason by postcolonial and feminist analyses of Jane Eyre (1847) by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1985).
- 4.
Chris Priestley recalls the influence the film has on his writing in an online article, “Gothic Thoughts,” Chris Priestley BlogSpot. 2012: http://chrispriestley.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/gothic-thoughts.html.
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Germaine Buckley, C. (2018). “You Don’t Think I’m Like Any Other Boy. That’s Why You’re Afraid”: Haunted/Haunting Children from The Turn of the Screw to Tales of Terror. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_18
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