The kids are definitely not all right: observing the troubling guises of innocence at work in Henry James' The Turn of the Screw

There’s something about the insertion of a child into a tale marked by frightful shadows that “gives the effect another turn of the screw.” In tales of terror, children can pose a special mystery, their consciousness a blank slate more vulnerable to invisible corruption. There’s the ambiguity of their knowingness and the veneer of their innocence to contend with, as well as the absolute power of their fear and acceptance both. And there is also a child’s relative proximity to the imagined other place from which we come and upon death return, a proximity that invites speculation as to the child’s access to that place’s knowledge and occult goings-on.

As the calendar days march their way toward October’s end and I crave some seasonal reading, I find myself snatching Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw from its place on my shelf once more. Few literary works give me the creeps so consistently, so satisfyingly, so eloquently, and given the novella’s length, it can easily be read in a single day –or preferably, a single night– and this somehow intensifies its tenor. Its truly one of those rare books I don’t want to put down once it’s started. Enormously influential and to this day hotly debated with regards to the reliability of its narrator, James’ sharp little masterpiece, originally published in 1898, possesses a singular power, driven by the psychological lucidity of its prose and striking imagery.

The story is somehow all the creepier for starting at a Christmas party, where several eager guests gather to hear one of their own talk of a woman he knew long ago, now dead some ten years, who relayed to him the chronicle of her encounter with sinister forces via a job she’d taken as the governess of two orphaned siblings. The set-up is rather strangely never returned to, and the unnamed governess takes the story’s reigns once it gets started proper, explaining the uncanny degree to which she becomes enchanted with the beatific children under her charge, and the strange figures that begin to appear once she’s settled into the children’s isolated Essex estate.

“I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers on a great drifting ship,” our protagonist tells us long before anything particularly unnerving occurs. The precision of James’ words allow the governess to articulate each step in her journey vividly, gradually drawing special attention to the blood-curdling geometry of gazes that characterize the story’s slipping into the realm of the potentially supernatural.

At one point the governess spots a conspicuously hatless intruder gazing at her through the kitchen window and dashes outside to confront him. Finding he’s vanished, she gazes back through the window from his estimated vantage point, in effect taking his place, and unintentionally scares the beejesus out of her colleague. At another point, little Flora gazes out her bedroom window at night and the governess, wanting to determine what it is Flora’s gazing at, goes to another window facing the same way, whereupon she sees little Miles out in the grounds at night, looking back toward the manor, yet not at her, nor at Flora, but up toward the tower, where the governess is almost certain no one could be.

The Turn of the Screw is an extraordinarily ocular piece of writing. It's visually evocative, but more than that it's compellingly preoccupied by the act of seeing and the impression seeing things makes on our sense of what’s real and what isn’t. James takes us through the governess’ process of trying to come to terms with what she sees, yet he never gives us a comfortable notion of what’s running through the minds of the children, who the governess fears are seeing things “terrible and unguessable and that spring from dreadful passages of intercourse in the past.” Because of this, James’ novella holds a revered niche in the halls of the macabre, implying that children, those little people with their bright, unfinished faces, are inherently intruders themselves, and no matter how much they seem to require our protection, they might just be the last ones we should trust.