“The Romance of the Nursery”: Lost Boys and Deadly Femininity in The Turn of the Screw and Peter Pan

While J. M. Barrie tells us at the beginning of Peter and Wendy that “[a]ll children, except one, grow up” (1), the fact is that many do not. This article pairs Peter Pan with Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, arguing that, in both texts, death acts as both an escape from and a marker of restrictive adult sexuality. While the figurative death of the child is closely associated with the intrusion of the feminine into homosocial boys’ “Neverlands,” literal death offers an escape from adult sexual and social roles for turn-of-the-century literary children, freezing them, like Peter Pan, in eternal, queer childhood.