...story is direct result of its various configurations of the threshold, "a place or condition of great power," but also "the locus of the horrible" (444). As most critics have noticed, the Bly estate abounds in thresholds both literal--doors, windows, mirrors, stairs, curtains, the lake's edge, twilight and figurative, including the position of our unnamed governess, who is not only liminal in the social status Victorian culture assigned her but also in her particular position at Bly, which is not hers but is certainly in her charge. (2) While critical attention has been paid to the children's ambiguous roles in the story as well, arguments have for the most part taken one of two basic directions: the children are complete innocents and thus become the victims of the mentally unstable governess, or they have been corrupted by the ghosts and thus are co-conspirators with Quint and Jessel from whom the governess tries to save them. (3) In the governess's own insistence on the latter reading, she calls the children "wonderful material to play on" (102), an ambivalent statement about the possibility of any agency the children may exert themselves and one of many mixed signals offered by both the narrator and the author of the story.

In the frame of the story--a Christmas fireside gathering to tell ghost stories--Douglas, the unnamed narrator's friend, piques the interest of all in his agreement that the ghost of the first storyteller's tale "appearing first to the little boy, at so tender an age, adds a particular touch. But ... if the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children--?" (22). This "double-your-horror" attribute seems to relegate the characters of the children to mere effects, which James's own declaration about his "wanton little tale" shortly after its publication seems to corroborate:

My bogey-tale dealt with things so hideous that I felt that to save it at all it needed some infusion of beauty or prettiness, and the beauty of the pathetic was the only attainable--was indeed inevitable. But ah, the exposure indeed, the helpless plasticity of childhood that isn't dear or sacred to somebody! That was my little tragedy. (Letters 84) (4)

In other words, James's "bogey-tale" is lifted to the status of a "little tragedy"--and thus apparently superior to those tales told around the fire before Douglas brings out his own--by dint of the pathos effected by the children. However, in an 1895 journal entry outlining his initial ideas for the story, James claims that the children in it are to be "bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree," whether innately or by the contamination of Quint or Jessel (Notebooks 178-79). "Particular" touches to a ghost story, instances of pathetic beauty, embodiments of evil to a "sinister degree": how are we to read the characters of these children so burdened with literary function?

That question can only be answered, we contend, by examining the multiple layers of possession with which the story is imbued, of which the least complicated layer may be that of the ghosts' possible possession of the children and thus Bly. The governess's own struggle for possession of the children, which soon reaches the intensity of a mission for her, may actually begin with her Jane Eyre-like daydream of a romantic encounter with the Master; if this fantasy were to be realized in marriage, she would indeed possess not only the children as their step-aunt but Bly, too, as its mistress. Thus, possession of the children becomes conflated with possession of Bly, both in terms of haunting and ownership. And that conflation goes further, beyond the actual boundaries of the novella: Miles's death means that he will never own the home to which he must be the heir, but he may possess it in a more pervasive way if his soul resides forever at Bly now that he has become, as the governess exclaims over his body, "dispossessed" of Quint (116). Further, with Miles's death and no other apparent heirs, Flora may be the next owner of the estate. While the children certainly provide a turn of the screw in terms of the effects their presence offers this ghost story, their liminality reverberates after the story's ending as together they effectively span not only life and death, but also at least the possibility of both spiritual and material possession of Bly.

In fact, James's phrase "plasticity of childhood" suggests the liminality of Victorian childhood itself. Susan Naverette explains that by the middle of the nineteenth-century children had come to be thought of as "mediating figures retaining intuitive and imaginative powers as well as a natural vitality and a natural (if untutored) piety" (117). Given their otherworldly origins, however, those Romantic "clouds of glory" can as easily signify the very opposite of piety; as Naverette argues, "childhood beauty is at best misleading and perhaps a signifier of damnation rather than the state of grace it should seem to embody" (125). (5) From their first meetings, the governess in The Turn of the Screw finds the children remarkably, even preternaturally attractive and repeatedly conflates that physical beauty with an angelic nature: Flora is "beatific," "radiant," "heavenly," and "angelic" (19-31), while Miles is not only "incredibly beautiful," but "the positive fragrance of purity" (35). Soon, however, the governess is suspecting "the very things that delighted" her: the children's "more than earthly beauty" is now a sure sign that their "absolutely unnatural goodness" is "a policy and a fraud" (73-74). Significantly, the language of possession is most direct at this juncture; as she tells Mrs. Grose, "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" (74). Of course, the governess believes that the children, if not "mine" or "ours," must belong to Quint and Jessel, but the question of who possesses the children is itself intrinsically related to what the children themselves possess, which, for the governess, is an unthinkable knowledge: "it's too monstrous: they know, they know!" (54). While here the "monstrous" is a specific awareness of the ghosts, such knowledge can also be that of the world outside the upper-class home, a "dark knowledge" of the supernatural and crime that servants tell in what Anthea Trodd calls "dangerous stories" (74). (6) Thus, the threat of The Turn of the Screw is not just that of the children possessing knowledge of these particular ghosts but also the very idea of being "tainted" by superstition and the lower class--and by sexuality. Hints of improprieties that may have taken place during Quint and Jessel's time appear early and often, including Mrs. Grose's comment that "It was Quint's own fancy. To play with him [Miles], I mean--to spoil him.... Quint was much too free.... Too free with every one!" (50). (7) At the least, such hints point toward Miles and Flora knowing of a sexual relationship between Quint and Miss Jessel and understanding enough about it that they abetted the trysts--if not, in fact, learning enough to model their own behavior from what they witnessed. Indeed, what can be read as sexually charged banter marks Miles's verbal exchanges with the governess at several points. His "boldness" comes to a head near the end after Flora has been taken away and Miles and the governess find themselves alone at Bly, taking dinner...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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