Kate Bush’s most uncomfortable song? – The Infant Kiss

Horror Moments, Kate Bush Edition

[Spoilers: The Innocents (1961), The Turn of the Screw (1898)]

If you are in any way sensitive to the theme of child abuse, sit this one out. I don’t normally put such explicit warnings at the start of an article, and there are no graphic descriptions or images ahead, but the song I discuss today is all about uncomfortable sexual dynamics between adults and children so be warned.

The first time I watched The Innocents (1961) as a teenager, I found it to be an enjoyably creepy gothic ghost story with spinetingling set pieces and a Victorian sense of melodrama. The second time I watched it, as a proper adult, I realised that it’s an astonishingly nuanced depiction of a truly chilling central theme, never stated outright but bubbling under the surface.  

The film is a faithful adaptation of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898). The basic plot of both book and film is as follows:

A governess arrives at a country mansion to look after two orphaned children for their absent uncle. She is charmed by them both, particularly the little boy, Miles, whose angelic behaviour makes his recent expulsion from boarding school seem hard to explain.

Odd things start to happen around the house. The governess is convinced she’s seen the ghostly figures of a man and a woman stalking the grounds and corridors of the grand estate. The little girl, Flora, is caught talking to someone by the lake. The protagonist begins to piece together the history of her predecessor, Miss Jessel, who had apparently behaved irresponsibly around the children, allowing them to spend time with her unpleasant lover, Peter Quint.

This is where the details of the story retreat a little into euphemism and allusion. It’s not clear exactly what has happened between the children and these two adults, both of whom are now dead. Mysterious words like ‘corruption’ are used, but whatever took place, the spirits of Jessel and Quint seem unwilling to leave the children alone.

The governess fights to extricate little Flora and Miles from these supernatural interferences, but she finds herself strangely drawn to the adult masculinity that Miles (perhaps possessed by Quint) now exhibits. The most famous moment in the film is when the little boy kisses his governess goodnight – passionately, on the lips – and she appears for a moment to have enjoyed it.  

This was the image that inspired The Infant Kiss, part of Kate Bush’s 1980 album Never for Ever. She praised this fan video that Chris Williams made for the song saying that it had picked out the key images that had stayed with her:

So. is this a song about paedophilia? The following quote comes from a transcribed interview with Bush originally published in ZigZag magazine in 1980. Here, she takes a firm position:¹

It’s not about that at all. It’s not the woman actually fancying the young kid. It’s the woman being attracted by a man inside the child. It just worries me that there were some people catching on to the idea of there being paedophilia, rather than just a distortion of a situation where there’s a perfectly normal, innocent boy with the spirit of a man inside, who’s extremely experienced and lusty. The woman can’t cope with the distortion. She can see that there’s some energy in the child that is not normal, but she can’t place it. Yet she has a very pure maternal love for the child, and it’s only little things like when she goes to give him a kiss at night, that she realizes there is a distortion, and it’s really freaking her out.

In all three versions of the story, book, film and song, you could thus argue that the repressed governess is only really attracted to the adult spirit possessing the boy and that her turmoil lies in how this desire clashes with her innocent feelings about Miles himself. The song suggests this most directly in the line ‘There’s a man behind those eyes’ (note Bush’s play on her famous song ‘The Man with the Child in his Eyes’).

But there’s still something deeply uncomfortable about the lyrics and I think the song’s power lies in the fact that the other, far more disturbing option, is still very much on the table, that the governess might be making excuses for a passion that is in fact directed at the child:

What is this? An infant kiss
That sends my body tingling?

I’ve never fallen for
A little boy before
No control

Just a kid and just at school
Back home they’d call me dirty
His little hand is on my heart
He’s got me where it hurts me

What if this isn’t the story of a virtuous woman defending a little boy against the manipulations of an evil seductive ghost? Perhaps she’s telling herself that, but what if she’s the real danger after all? There’s a lot more going on under the surface here and it surely isn’t all ‘maternal’.

Watching the film again, I found the governess herself to be an increasingly dislikeable presence. If you admit the possibility of a dark subtext, her repressed sexuality, her fixation with the children’s purity, and her adoration of Miles become a lot more sinister.

The same behaviours that had made the children eerie and dislikeable also totally changed once I considered this reading. The fact that the usually good-natured Miles has been acting out at school, that he and Flora have been using explicit language, that their moods and behaviours are unpredictable and that they seem both drawn to and afraid of Jessel and Quint, all suddenly look like what we recognise today as the tell-tale signs of child abuse.

Unluckily, and like so many real-world victims, Miles seems to have attracted the attentions of another dubious adult by acting out in a sexualised way. The governess thinks she is rescuing him from his ghostly abusers but watch the last scene of the film again with more cynical eyes and the governess’ own psychosexual fixations seem to drive events to their conclusion, epitomising what Henry James’ biographer Leon Edel said of the original novel “it is not the ghosts who haunt the children, but the governess.”

When it was originally published, The Turn of the Screw was controversial because it broke with the Victorian tradition of idealising childhood. It is certainly an influence on the branch of horror films where children are monstrous or demonic, sometimes called ‘paedophobic’ films.   

Yet what made the story truly ahead of its time was the web of clues it weaves about exactly what the abusive adults might have done to Miles and Flora, and how that abuse has transformed them. This is certainly expanded upon in The Innocents and for my money is absolutely there in The Infant Kiss whether Bush intended this reading or not. However we characterise the governess, this isn’t really a story about evil children, it’s about the horror of what happens when adults project their desires onto children and when the strain of those distorted relationships proves too much for a little heart to bear.

Next week, we encounter an historical horror on Bush’s most famous album. Until then, happy nightmares everyone!

Horror moments are posted every Thursday and a wide variety of articles exploring the history of magic, theatre, storytelling, and more are published on Monday afternoons.

1. http://gaffa.org/reaching/i80_zz.html compiled by Andrew Marvick