10: Childhood in Ruins


Set Reading

  • Henry James, “Turn of the Screw”

Additional Reading

  • Pifer, Ellen, extracts from “Introduction: The Image of Childhood,” and Chapter 3, “The Child at a Turning Point: James’s The Turn of the Screw,” Demon or Doll: Images of the Child in Contemporary Writing and Culture, Charlottesville & London: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
  • Felman, Soshana, extracts from “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, John Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Seminar Framework

This week’s seminar offers a different perspective on the issue of saving the child considered in week 7; focusing on a text that has generated an astonishing volume of critical material on the subject: Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). Although, they are not known to have met or to have read each other’s work, many critics (see Pifer) have noted a certain affinity between the work of James and Sigmund Freud, whose principle early works were also emerging at this time [Studies on Hysteria (1895), The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). His The Essays on  The Theory of Sexuality, which includes his first concrete theorizing of his thoughts on “Infantile Sexuality” would be published in 1905. Penguin Freud Library vol.7]. Pifer suggests this affinity lies in a shared ambivalence to the Romantic and 19th century assumption about the (asexual) innocence of childhood. The seminar will therefore ask you to consider this text as a further illustration of this tension between the projection of adult desire onto the child, and the impossibility of the child articulating its own desire under the force of these projections. It will also further engage with the problem of “reading” the child.