Twentieth-Century Models of Development: Precocity in James and Freud

This final chapter asks where the precocious child ‘goes’ at the end of the Victorian period. I analyse the model of individual development enacted in Sigmund Freud’s ‘Dora’ (1905) and compare it with that of Henry James’s A Small Boy and Others (1913) to suggest that the dialogic model of individual development both James and Freud explore is comparable with Eliot’s in The Mill on the Floss and likewise has a phylogenic counterpart in Darwin’s model of species development. Thus, the precocious child of Victorian culture endures in the emergent discipline of psychoanalysis and in an experimental work of twentieth-century autobiography and continues to undermine linearity, hierarchy, teleology, and finality in the relationship between adult (self) and child (self). However, James’s best-known and most lasting work is a study both of the enduring need for an idea that the adult has progressed beyond the child and of the pathological effects of this need on both adult and child. I end this chapter, therefore, arguing that in The Turn of the Screw (1898) and in an earlier short story, ‘The Author of Beltraffio’ (1884), a progressive model of individual development persists, intractable, despite its violence towards both child and adult.