"Wondrous Material to Play on": Children As Sites of Gothic Liminality in the Turn of the Screw, The Innocents, And the Others (Critical Essay‪)‬

Concerned as Gothic fiction is with various states somewhere in between living and dead, reality and unreality, sanity and insanity, Henry James's The Turn of the Screw offers a seminal text for a study of liminality. (1) As Richard Dilworth Rust argues, the ongoing fascination with James's story is a 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: