Chapter 2 - Fauntleroy’s Ghost

Summary

Chapter two turns to Henry James’s supernatural classic, The Turn of the Screw (1898), to show the backlash of the literary intelligentsia against New Thought and the inner child. This chapter reads The Turn of the Screw as a critical response to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy that mocks the book’s saccharine portrayal of innocent children and its New Thought overtones. While siblings Miles and Flora initially resemble Lord Fauntleroy in their youth, beauty, and apparent innocence, their subsequent actions could not be more different. Whereas Burnett’s protagonist heals his grieving mother and depressed grandfather and brings them spiritual peace, Miles and Flora lead their governess to the brink of madness by consorting with evil spirits. James, who wrote so perceptively about the inner life of a child a year earlier in What Maisie Knew (1897), deliberately portrayed Miles and Flora as opaque, unsympathetic, and allied with dark forces. In so doing, he skewered New Thought's relentless idealization of children as conduits to God. He also paved the way for more recent depictions of evil children in horror fiction and in films such as The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976), or We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011).