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.
Thank you so much for this wonderful interpretation! In fact the vast majority of readers agree with you that the ghosts are a figment of an increasingly deranged governess.
I am so glad you brought up the issue of social class in the book, because I didn’t even touch on it, but it is foregrounded in the story, particularly through Mrs. Grose. I agree that the story is an indictment of how the upper class is indifferent at best and callous at worst to children. As you probably know, one of James’s most heartbreaking works is What Maisie Knew, about an ugly divorce and custody battle. At first Maisie’s mother and father fight because each of them wants Maisie. Then they each get new partners, and neither one wants Maisie anymore. They each strategize to dump Maisie on the other, to ditch her, to get away from her. It is so terribly sad.
It must have been a tough experience to go to one of those boarding schools. I used to teach at an elite private school, and the parents were often as you describe. One time a girl was in a car crash on her way to school, she called her dad in tears, and he called the school and asked if the secretary could “deal with it” because he had “an important meeting.” Again I am reminded that it is much better to have a loving family than to be rich.
I haven’t read What Maisie Knew-- how sad! I want to read it now. I haven’t really read much Henry James. In college a professor I really admired made a comment at a party once -- really clever but I won’t be able to re-create it -- about how of the two brothers, William was the one worth remembering and I think that subtly led me not to read Henry, really!
That poor girl (in the car accident). I can totally imagine this happening.
Yes it was a hard experience -- a huge culture shock and very hard to fit in, because my family was very poor even by “scholarship kid” standards and there were certain ways scholarship kids were treated. (One of many: the scholarship girls were all assumed to be sluts so I got asked out a lot before I figured that out -- and until _they_ figured out I wasn’t interested.)
But on the other hand, I had a really “difficult” home life, so going away (anywhere, even a bizarre environment where I didn’t fit in) was an improvement.
I got an amazing education there and am grateful for that. I learned how to fit in among people very different from me (how they behaved etc) and that was an education in itself. And I’m grateful for escaping a rough situation at home. But if I were wealthy I wouldn’t send my kids to a place like that, no matter how prestigious the school and no matter how many “connections” they might make. Just not worth it.
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.
Terrific comment! I agree that Quint and the Guardian are a lot alike--and that it’s possible the Governess is attracted to Quint for that very reason. Your last sentence is excellent. I love “the reality of our emotions, not the reality of our circumstances.”
I admit that in thinking about this, and your post, I thought about recent media surrounding very high-profile court proceedings - both interpersonal cases, and political. In any human intimacy and in any human conspiracy, things happen that would be unbelievable if you weren’t there. “Loyalty” is a very strange, and very irrational, emotion.
My so what is that I love reading your analysis. I hope you do more books! I wish I had had you for English lit in high school .... but no time like the present!
Another great column, Mari. I find myself wanting to know more about Henry James’s life. He is known as an incredible stylist, but he also knew a lot about life, as your discussion of the story makes clear.
He had a fascinating life. He was probably gay but celibate, and many women had heartbreaking unrequited crushes on him. I wonder whether he was able to imagine their feelings and gave them to the Governess?
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!!!!!
Thank you so much for this wonderful interpretation! In fact the vast majority of readers agree with you that the ghosts are a figment of an increasingly deranged governess.
I am so glad you brought up the issue of social class in the book, because I didn’t even touch on it, but it is foregrounded in the story, particularly through Mrs. Grose. I agree that the story is an indictment of how the upper class is indifferent at best and callous at worst to children. As you probably know, one of James’s most heartbreaking works is What Maisie Knew, about an ugly divorce and custody battle. At first Maisie’s mother and father fight because each of them wants Maisie. Then they each get new partners, and neither one wants Maisie anymore. They each strategize to dump Maisie on the other, to ditch her, to get away from her. It is so terribly sad.
It must have been a tough experience to go to one of those boarding schools. I used to teach at an elite private school, and the parents were often as you describe. One time a girl was in a car crash on her way to school, she called her dad in tears, and he called the school and asked if the secretary could “deal with it” because he had “an important meeting.” Again I am reminded that it is much better to have a loving family than to be rich.
I haven’t read What Maisie Knew-- how sad! I want to read it now. I haven’t really read much Henry James. In college a professor I really admired made a comment at a party once -- really clever but I won’t be able to re-create it -- about how of the two brothers, William was the one worth remembering and I think that subtly led me not to read Henry, really!
That poor girl (in the car accident). I can totally imagine this happening.
Yes it was a hard experience -- a huge culture shock and very hard to fit in, because my family was very poor even by “scholarship kid” standards and there were certain ways scholarship kids were treated. (One of many: the scholarship girls were all assumed to be sluts so I got asked out a lot before I figured that out -- and until _they_ figured out I wasn’t interested.)
But on the other hand, I had a really “difficult” home life, so going away (anywhere, even a bizarre environment where I didn’t fit in) was an improvement.
I got an amazing education there and am grateful for that. I learned how to fit in among people very different from me (how they behaved etc) and that was an education in itself. And I’m grateful for escaping a rough situation at home. But if I were wealthy I wouldn’t send my kids to a place like that, no matter how prestigious the school and no matter how many “connections” they might make. Just not worth it.
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.
Terrific comment! I agree that Quint and the Guardian are a lot alike--and that it’s possible the Governess is attracted to Quint for that very reason. Your last sentence is excellent. I love “the reality of our emotions, not the reality of our circumstances.”
I admit that in thinking about this, and your post, I thought about recent media surrounding very high-profile court proceedings - both interpersonal cases, and political. In any human intimacy and in any human conspiracy, things happen that would be unbelievable if you weren’t there. “Loyalty” is a very strange, and very irrational, emotion.
My so what is that I love reading your analysis. I hope you do more books! I wish I had had you for English lit in high school .... but no time like the present!
Thank you so much! I’m already thinking about the next book club--possibly a story by Flannery O’Connor. 😊
Another great column, Mari. I find myself wanting to know more about Henry James’s life. He is known as an incredible stylist, but he also knew a lot about life, as your discussion of the story makes clear.
He had a fascinating life. He was probably gay but celibate, and many women had heartbreaking unrequited crushes on him. I wonder whether he was able to imagine their feelings and gave them to the Governess?