Possessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film This page intentionally left blank Possessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film Contrary States

Adrian Schober © Adrian Michael Schober 2004 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2004 978-1-4039-3510-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-51771-8 ISBN 978-0-230-59954-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230599543 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schober, Adrian, 1974– Possessed child narratives in literature and film: contrary states / Adrian Schober. p. cm. Filmography: p. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

1. American fiction–20th century–History and criticism. 2. Demoniac possession in literature. 3. Psychological fiction, American–History and criticism. 4. Fantasy fiction, American–History and criticism. 5. Demonology in motion pictures. 6. Children in motion pictures. 7. Demonology in literature. 8. Children in literature. I. Title. PS374.D35S36 2004 813’.509353–dc22 2004044357

10987654321 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 For my mother, my best friend

v This page intentionally left blank Contents

Acknowledgements viii Preface ix 1 Introduction 1 Contrary states 1 The lost child 7 The possessed child: themes and variations 11 Culture, religion and discourse 28 2 The New England Connection 38 Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter 42 Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw 54 3 God is Dead 63 William Peter Blatty’s and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist 64 Masculinity in crisis: Damiano Damiani’s Amityville II: The Possession 81 4 East Meets West 87 Frank De Felitta’s and Robert Wise’s Audrey Rose 87 5 Culture Shock 110 James Herbert’s Shrine 116 6 For Children Only? 134 William Mayne’s IT 136 Victor Kelleher’s Del-Del 151 7 Conclusion 164 Notes 174 Filmography 182 Bibliography 185 Index 196

vii Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Dr Heather Scutter for her endless patience and sound advice and for sharing with me her boundless knowledge. Without her firm guiding hand this book would not have been possible. I would also like to acknowledge the mentoring influence of Professor Brian McFarlane whose input was minimal but who was always there ‘in spirit’. Finally, I am grateful to Warner Books for allowing me to reproduce (at no personal expense) the front cover of the 1975 American paperback edition of Audrey Rose by Frank De Felitta.

viii Preface

This book undertakes a study of the trope of the possessed child in literature and film, first given serious consideration in Henry James’s celebrated psychological-cum-ghost story The Turn of the Screw (1898), and reaching its peak of popularity in William Friedkin’s blockbuster film of William Peter Blatty’s bestseller The Exorcist (1973 and 1971 respectively). The possessed child is understood as a young person whose mind and/or body is under the influence of an evil spirit, alien intelligence or deity. The book adopts as its central metaphor poet William Blake’s notion of ‘contrary states’, which is taken to refer to an unresolved dialectic between Calvinist and Romantic ideologies of childhood. It is argued that possessed child narratives, because of the way they problematise issues of guilt, innocence and agency, fre- quently negotiate tensions between the Calvinist and Romantic. More importantly, it is argued that the possessed child is fundamentally an American phenomenon which, first, can be traced first to the Calvinist bias of the United States as a nation with its roots in Puritanism; and, second, to the ascendancy of Roman Catholicism in contemporary American life and culture, to which Puritanism owes its origins. It is suggested that, in their metaphysical and moral assumptions about good and evil and human nature, Roman Catholicism and Puritanism form part of a common discourse. The intersection of the two belief systems in The Exorcist has, by intensifying Calvinist ideologies of childhood, powerfully impressed the possessed child on the popular imagination, giving the image its distinctively American face. It is more difficult, therefore, to envisage such narratives in a non-Puritan or non-Roman Catholic cultural context such as, for example, England, where Anglican theology prevails. For my purposes, I have conformed to the Australian legal definition of a child as a person between the ages of 0 and 18. However, in my choice of works for extended analysis I have opted to focus specifically on chil- dren in the somewhat younger age group to minimise the ambiguity associated with what constitutes a child. While I have included canonised works and more obscure examples, I have deliberately chosen to focus on popular or ‘representative’ texts. Also, for the purposes of comparison, I have given extended analysis to two contributions from the field of chil- dren’s literature. The introduction covers important ground by outlining

ix x Possessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film two meta-narratives integral to the construction of the child figure in Western literature and culture: those that incorporate Calvinist ideologies and those that draw on the Romantic Movement. This is first discussed in terms of the universal motif of the lost child, before narrowing the focus to the more culturally specific motif of the possessed child, framed as a special case of the lost child. To delineate further what is meant by a possessed child, other themes and variations in the evil child genre are also discussed. I then provide an overview of the different discourses that impinge on the possessed child phenomenon, as well as theoretical frameworks that will be implemented to enumerate its historic and cultural specificity. Chapter 2 traces the possessed child’s formative influences in historic American Puritanism in relation to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) while, linking James with Hawthorne, I discuss The Turn of the Screw (1898) as the first sustained treatment of the possessed child motif. In chapter 3, I explain the possessed child’s ‘coming of age’ in Friedkin’s/Blatty’s The Exorcist by examining the crucial interplay between historic Puritanism and contemporary developments in Roman Catholicism in the United Sates. In this chapter, I also briefly consider one of the many Exorcist imitations, Amityville II: The Possession (1982). In chapter 4, I examine in Robert Wise’s film of Frank De Felitta’s novel Audrey Rose (1977 and 1975 respectively) further evidence of the pos- sessed child’s debt to religious/cultural discourses, where Eastern spiritu- ality intersects with Judeo-Christian beliefs. Chapter 5 assesses the viability of the possessed child in English culture in James Herbert’s Shrine (1983), while chapter 6 assesses the ability of the field of chil- dren’s literature to deal adequately with the ‘adult’ theme of possession in William Mayne’s highly literary IT (1977) from England and Victor Kelleher’s somewhat Americanised treatment, Del-Del (1991), from Australia. In my conclusion, I fully explicate the cultural factors and anxieties surrounding the possessed child’s occurrence. Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repul- sion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call good and evil. Good is the passive that obeys reason: Evil is the active springing from energy. Good is Heaven; Evil is Hell. (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, circa 1793)

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