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The 21st Century Salonnière's avatar

So last week, people seemed to agree the ghosts were real, and I was too embarrassed to post and say “oh I assumed they weren’t real.”

In other words, I’d have to admit I didn’t think too much about it beyond “well, ghosts aren’t real” — even though, duh, I was well aware I was reading gothic fiction where, duh again, ghosts are sometimes real.

I enjoy literature but can struggle with it at times.

So I read the story through the prism of “this really isolated person imagines ghosts and becomes more and more unhinged until she murders a boy, but it doesn’t seemed to have harmed her career in governessing” (because we learn that she subsequently was a governess for another family).

Because we do read fiction through the lens of our own experiences, I viewed it through the lens of social class: I saw it as a story of careless rich people who don’t value their children, and provide for them as long as they don’t need to be bothered with them.

It made me think back to my “boarding school days” (ha! can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it to you but I was one of the token poor children at an elite boarding school; I’m grateful for the education but —what a den of dysfunction) and how abandoned, troubled, and emotionally developmentally delayed a lot of those kids seemed.

Their parents had all the resources in the world and yet it can’t be emphasized enough: even though some children of very famous and successful people were there, that place was full of misery and dysfunction (and years later we learned about a lot of sexual abuse among at least a half dozen faculty who preyed on students during the time I was there).

So the Guardian reminded me of these extremely well-off people who (to use a maudlin cliche) don’t understand where their riches really lie, and how you can have a lot of resources and yet really mess up the next generation. (Or create a generation much like yours, where they can talk smoothly to anyone at a reception, they can run organizations or foundations, but they don’t have an emotional connection to their own children when the time comes, so off to boarding school they go.)

This was a high school, but some of the kids had been attending such schools from much younger ages.

The Guardian hired any random person who agreed to his conditions, as long as the kids were not his problem.

So bizarre. So unnatural. More unnatural than an isolated person becoming unhinged and delusional and homicidal. More unnatural than seeing ghosts or believing in them.

Part of the reason I thought the ghosts weren’t real, btw, was because only the governess saw them and was affected by them. The other characters were only affected by the increasingly unhinged behavior of the governess.

How would she ever get a job after Miles died? (Unless rich people really don’t care about their kids as long as they don’t have to deal with them day-to-day.)

But, the more rational part of me thought it was just an entertaining story the narrator from the beginning told and completely made up. There was no Governess, no Guardian, no ghosts, no string of deaths. He was just entertaining people over the holidays.

So I know these are very incorrect readings (!) — it just relates to the associations it brought up for me. The only place it intersects with your reading, too, is by seeing the Guardian as somewhat of a bad guy instead of as a…nonentity.

I love all the pictures you included!!!!!

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Sarah's avatar

A detail about the Guardian that the Governess never really says outright: He’s a lot like Quint, from what little we know of him. Seductive, uncaring of his responsibilities for the children, using his charm to sway a young woman to act in his interest with little care for what actually happens to her. Mrs. Grose says early on, if I recall correctly, that he and Quint are close, and the Guardian trusts him implicitly with his affairs. The Governess immediately assumes Quint must have betrayed his trust, not that the Guardian didn’t actually care - or even approved of - what Quint was doing. But the Guardian is high-class and Quint is low-class and she’s in love with the Guardian, so she draws her conclusions.

To the extent I take anything from the book, it’s a reminder that any given human situation is a mix of the obvious and the bizarre. We often hear things secondhand and say that something couldn’t have happened, that no one would have responded to X with Y; but we act within the reality of our emotions, not necessarily the reality of our circumstances.

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