Jason Schneiderman

An Absent Boy: Projected and Protected Desire in Michael Lowenthal’s Avoidance and Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw
  

Are boys subaltern? Can they speak?  In literature that deals with molested boys, the voice of the boy is always tenuous, hesitant, coopted and occluded. Beyond the material fact that children rarely write the novels in which they are depicted, the boys in the novels that I will look at here are rarely allowed to express their own desires. Rather, the desire of a mediating adult is projected onto them—in both cases with disastrous results. Though written over a century apart, Michael Lowenthal’s Avoidance and Henry James’ Turn of the Screw are narratives in which the protagonists are constantly projecting desire, motivation and experience onto an boy at risk from a sexual predator.  Using current theories of masculinity and trauma, I will show the ways in which the projection of these protagonists ultimately displaces (in one case, fatally) the boys they set out to protect.  

Jason Schneiderman is working on his dissertation at the Graduate Center of CUNY.  A poet, his book Sublimation Point was published in 2004, and his poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, Tin House, Best American Poetry, Poetry London, and American Poetry Review.  He is a Writing Fellow at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.