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When Henry James sat down to write his "amusette" as he called The Turn of the Screw (1898), he created various ambiguities in the text as a means of confusing and surprising his readers or, in other words, catching them off guard. Over a century later, the mysterious ambiance surrounding the novella has not become any clearer. While critics from Edmund Wilson to Edna Kenton have analyzed the work from a somewhat psychoanalytical perspective, stating that the ghosts of Miss Jessel and Peter Quint are merely figments of the governess's imagination, Tzvetan Todorov and Rosemary Jackson examine James's work through a fantastic approach, putting faith in the governess's narrative. From Todorov's perspective, the fantastic requires: "... the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural a supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work- in the case of naïve reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as 'poetic' interpretations. (33)" In other words, Todorov's concept of hesitation involves a focus on an external point, the perspective of the reader. Yet, the reader's perspective cannot be separated from the character or thematic value of the work, thus linking the two elements through hesitation itself. Todorov explains that The Turn of the Screw fits the characteristics of the fantastic genre in regard to the reader's hesitation. Indeed, it is that very quality which has created so much critical contention in the past. Because of this hesitation, the reader must determine whether or not to believe the governess and thus, believe in the reality of the ghosts. While I will begin by defining the fantastic from Todorov's and Jackson's perspective, it is my belief that both authors fail to connect all of the elements that appear in James's text without venturing outside of the work. In my thesis, I will strictly adhere to James's novella, focusing only on the content as I connect the governess's experience to an alternative reality rather than a deviation into psychological madness. In this way, The Turn of the Screw will be revealed as a fantastic text, producing its effects on the reader through the evolution of these tendencies within the work.

This thesis deals with the functioning of the family in connection with the physiological and psychosocial development of children. It also describes the reasons why children are taken away from the family and the options of residential care. The first option is institutional care in orphanages and therefore we mention several organisations that offer projects to help these children in particular to have an easier entry to life after the completion of institutional care. The empirical part of this study analyses the background, the habits and also the preparation of young adults to leave the orphanage in two institutions: Primary school and Orphanage Přestavlky and Orphanage Klánovice. It includes personal life stories of several children not only from the two orphanages but also from children brought up in foster care. The main goal of this thesis was to find out whether the children brought up in orphanages have different vision of the future in comparison with children raised in foster care. The results of our open- ended interview survey are presented in the final part of this paper.

The Victorian governess occupied a difficult position in Victorian society. Straddling the line between genteel and working-class femininity, the governess did not fit neatly into the rigid categories of gender and class according to which Victorian society organized itself. This troubling liminality caused the governess to become implicitly associated with another disturbing domestic presence caught between worlds: the Victorian literary ghost. Using Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw as a touchstone for each chapter, this thesis examines how the spectral mirrors the governess’s own spectrality – that is, her own discursive construction as a psychosocially unsettling force within the Victorian domestic sphere.