The Mad Child in the Attic:

John Harding’s Florence & Giles as a Neo-Victorian Reworking of The Turn of the Screw

Abstract

This article examines John Harding’s novel Florence & Giles (2010) as a neo-Victorian reworking of Henry James’s classic The Turn of the Screw (1898). Focussing on the representation of childhood, this article aims to demonstrate that Florence & Giles is the first reworking of The Turn of the Screw that centres entirely on one of the child characters, who is simultaneously its protagonist and narrator. In the larger context of neo-Victorian fiction, which has tended to marginalise child characters, the work is equally progressive. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self, the article argues that Harding radicalises the subversion of Victorian childhood innocence which is already implicit in James’s text as it foregrounds various modes of transgression, particularly through its effective employment of voice, space, and agency. Finally, the article intends to show how Florence & Giles intertwines the deconstruction of Victorian ideals of childhood with contemporary discourses on the issue of childhood.