Miles' death

Miles' death

1. 'We were alone on that quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped'

2. It was the Governess

   • ‘She has literally frightened him to death’- Wilson, 1934
   • ‘Miles death is caused by the Governess’s insistence on his confession… but the experience- the fright, the horror, the recognition of evil- is too much for Miles.’ –Hoffman, 1953
   • ‘She is the evil force, or at least its vehicle. Miles… is dead, dispossessed, not of the ghosts he never sees, but of the governess.’ –Crowe, 1962
   • ‘The way the governess states her killing of little Miles makes it seem as if God has called him to Heaven after her efforts had succeeded in exorcizing Quint’s evil… They are words of self justification.’ McElroy, 1981
   • ‘Miles dies from overexposure… He dies because the governess cannot quench the consequences of her own urgent desire to possess the ghosts of Bly.’ – Chinitz, 1994
   • ‘The Turn of the Screw’ is… a tragedy about an evil older woman [Mrs Grose] who drove an unstable younger women completely out of her mind, and whose jealousy was the indirect cause of a little boy’s death.’ –Aldrich, 1967
   • ‘His survival to adulthood would defeat the governess’s subversion of patriarchy. She could not allow him to repeat the degenerate presence of Quint, not the irresponsible absence of his uncle. He dies into silence and absence… Like Quint he is ‘hurled over an abyss’, and like Quint, he falls out of the text.’ –Pearson, 1992

3. It was Quint

   • ‘Small wonder Miles dies; he has been forced to see the only source of knowledge he has known in his brief life, Quint, and an embodiment of evil, and himself a victim of Original sin.’ –Firebaugh, 1957
   • Miles’s homoerotic sexual adventures, for which he has been expelled from school, and death by shock. - Resonates as an artistic rendering of homosexual panic.’ –Kaplan, 1992
   • ‘To deprive a person of sexuality is to deprive him of life; for, on an unconscious level, it may well seem that the loss of erotic freedom is what kills little Miles at the end of the tale.’ –Schero, 1981

4. Other interpretations

   • ‘The reason Miles dies is because he can’t decide. ‘Extinction through indecision’ would be the aesthetic coroner’s statement about him.’ –Eli Siegel, 1968
   • ‘Little Miles is dead… exhausted by the ordeal… too corrupted to live without evil.’ –Fagin, 1947
   • ‘She catches him and holds him for a minute before she realises that Miles has succumbed to his own liberation. And his death leaves us ever to wander in the darkness of our own confusion.’- Haggerty, 1989
   • Miles’ death highlights the ways in which sexual and gender transgressions jeopardise the status quo.’ Walton
   • ‘He dies, worn out by the struggle between good and evil, in the moment of triumph.’ –Liddell, 1947
   • ‘Peter Quint and the governess collaborate, by a dreadful collision of psychic energies, in the death of young Miles.’- Lewis, 1983
     • Modern scholars have tried to move away from Quint and the Governess being mutually exclusive answers to them being able to compliment one another