Possessing a Child

Possessing a nun, possessing a man: it is by these sensational actions that Measure for Measure and Billy Budd so starkly reveal the way in which desire offends against the integrity and dignity of its object. The only thing worse in our culture than taking or possessing a nun or a man is paedophilia or possessing a child, and this is the agonised territory of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and of the Benjamin Britten opera based on that novella. (Britten also, of course, set Billy Budd to music; and possession in its demonic aspect is a major theme of Peter Grimes.) The Turn of the Screw plays on the simultaneously demonic and sexual connotations of possession, with the governess who narrates it telling how she has become convinced that the two beautiful children in her care, Miles and Flora, are haunted by the spirits of two recently deceased servants, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, who, Miss Jessel’s narrative darkly implies, abused them as part of their own dark sexual relationship. At the climax of the work, the overwrought woman confronts and challenges one of these spectres. ‘It’s he ?’, the boy Miles asks her, in a panic. And when the governess, coldly ‘determined to have all my proof’, asks Miles who he means, the boy shrieks ambiguously, ‘Peter Quint – you devil!’, to which she revealingly and chillingly responds, ‘What does he matter now, my own? – what will he ever matter? I have you,’ only to find, ‘his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped’ (121). ¹