"To Contaminate? To Corrupt"
The Turn of the Screw, Part 1: What?
Welcome to the Happy Wanderer summer book club! This week and next week we’ll be discussing The Turn of the Screw, a Victorian ghost story by Henry James, published in 1898. (If you haven’t read the book yet and would still like to, you can find it here for free.) Because the book is so ambiguous, and because its narrator is arguably the least reliable in all of English literature, we will divide our discussion into two parts. This week, we will talk about the What: What do we think really happens in the book? How much can we trust the Governess, and how much ought we to be skeptical of her? Next week, we will talk about the So What: What is the point of the book, and what lessons can we take from it?
The Plot
The Turn of the Screw begins—as is typical of gothic fiction—with a frame story. To entertain guests at a house party, Douglas reads aloud the manuscript of The Turn of the Screw, which is an account of events that happened forty years before and which the Governess had written and given to Douglas. Interestingly, the frame never closes; the book ends without ever returning to the house party or offering judgments or reactions from the listeners.
The unnamed Governess interviews for and accepts a job caring for two children, Miles and Flora, at Bly, an isolated estate. The unnamed Guardian who offers her the job is the children’s uncle; he makes it a condition of employment that the Governess never contact him or trouble him in any way. The Governess falls in love with the Guardian at first sight and agrees to this condition. When she arrives at Bly, she immediately hits it off with Mrs. Grose (the housekeeper), and with little Flora. Miles is away at boarding school.
The first sign of trouble comes a few days later, when Miles is expelled from school for an unknown reason. The Governess declares that the expulsion is a sign that Miles is “wicked.” A short while later, the Governess is on an evening walk and sees a mysterious man, who creeps her out. She describes him to Mrs. Grose, who identifies the man as Peter Quint. Quint was the Guardian’s valet and died the previous winter. Next, the Governess is at the pond with Flora one day and sees a woman on the other side of the pond. The Governess says the woman is Miss Jessel, the previous governess, and Mrs. Grose agrees. Miss Jessel also died recently.
The Governess becomes convinced that the figures she sees are ghosts who want to “corrupt” and “possess” the children, but she can’t bring herself to speak to the children about the ghosts because she thinks there is a chance the children are innocent. Instead, she engages in escalating efforts to protect them, efforts that the children resist. Near the end of the book, the Governess accuses Flora of being able to see Miss Jessel, and Flora becomes hysterical. At the Governess’s request, Mrs. Grose takes Flora away to her uncle, and the Governess remains at Bly with Miles so she can confront him about the ghosts. Miles dies at the end, although it is unclear whether this is because the Governess smothers him to death in an embrace (“I caught him, yes, I held him—it may be imagined with what a passion”), whether Quint somehow kills him, or whether Miles dies accidentally while the Governess engages in a psychic battle with Quint. The Governess says only that “his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.” These are the final words of the story.
What We Know
The book raises several questions, but the one most debated by critics is, Are the ghosts real, or are they a figment of the Governess’s hysterical imagination? Because the Governess is an unreliable narrator, it is helpful to specify what we know before we try to answer this question.
The Governess
is twenty, beautiful, and the “youngest of several daughters of a poor country parson.” She has been sheltered and is described as “fluttering” and “nervous.” She later refers to “disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well,” and she describes her father as having “eccentricities.”
She fantasizes that the Guardian will hear reports of her courage and admire her for it: “By my discretion, my quiet good sense and general high propriety, I was giving pleasure—if he ever thought of it!—to the person to whose pressure I had responded.”
She is able to describe Peter Quint in precise detail.
She tells Mrs. Grose, falsely, that she met up with a friend, and Mrs. Grose is surprised: “‘A friend—YOU?’” (Oh snap!)
She is apparently still employable after Miles’s death, because at age thirty she is working as a governess for Douglas’s sister.
The Guardian
is handsome, rich, and charming. He “likes them young and beautiful.” (It is possible that Mrs. Grose intends this description for Peter Quint, but she doesn’t argue when the Governess assumes she means the Guardian.)
At the start of the story he doesn’t want to be troubled by his niece and nephew in any way, or even to see them, but before the story opens he had been to Bly many times to see them.
He leaves his valet, Quint, with the children.
Mrs. Grose
is a nice middle-aged lady. She loves the children and has been in charge of Flora since Miss Jessel’s departure.
She is illiterate and “a magnificent monument to the blessing of a want of imagination,” in the Governess’s words. (Rude!)
She says she doesn’t see the ghosts (the Governess despairs that Mrs. Grose’s “eyes were hopelessly sealed”) and often seems baffled by the Governess’s fears. At the end of the book she says she has come to believe in the ghosts because Flora has used coarse language.
She criticizes Quint for having been “too free” with Miles.
Miles
is ten and a beautiful, intelligent child. He plays piano well and is good enough at math that he has already gone beyond what the Governess can teach him.
The only concrete evidence of his “badness” is underwhelming. The letter from Miles’s headmaster doesn’t say why he was expelled, but Miles admits that he “said things” to his friends that were spread around the school.
He wants to return to school and says that it isn’t appropriate for a boy like him to be brought up by a governess. He begs the Governess repeatedly to send him either to school or to his uncle.
He makes a couple of raffish remarks about women.
Flora
is eight and also beautiful and imaginative.
When Miss Jessel first appears on the opposite side of the pond, Flora turns her back to the pond, an action that the Governess takes to mean that Flora sees the ghost but is trying to pretend she doesn’t.
Flora plays in a way that lends itself to a Freudian interpretation: “She had picked up a small flat piece of wood, which happened to have in it a little hole that had evidently suggested to her the idea of sticking in another fragment. … She was very markedly and intently attempting to tighten [it] in its place.”
Peter Quint
is tall, handsome, clever, and definitely “not a gentleman.” He wears clothes he borrowed or stole from the Guardian.
He was Miles’s constant companion, something that Mrs. Grose feels to be inappropriate: “‘It was Quint’s own fancy. To play with him, I mean—to spoil him.’”
He is, in Mrs. Grose’s words, “a hound.”
He seduces Miss Jessel, and Mrs. Grose implies that he has seduced other young women too (“‘He did what he wished. … With them all.’”)
He dies on his way home from the pub when he slips on some ice, falls down a hill, and hits his head.
Miss Jessel
is young, beautiful, and “a lady.” Mrs. Grose says that she was a good governess who loved the children.
Once Quint arrives, Miss Jessel has Flora with her constantly, while Quint takes Miles.
Quint seduces her, and she leaves Bly abruptly. Mrs. Grose later learns from the Guardian that Miss Jessel has died.
Additional information
Douglas met the Governess when he was twenty and she was thirty. He falls in love with the Governess but reports that she is still in love with the Guardian, even though she has seen him only twice in her life.
The Governess sees Quint four times: Once on top of the tower, once on the stairs, and twice staring through the dining room window. In all four cases he stares (“fixed me”) but does nothing else.
The Governess sees Miss Jessel four times too: Twice by the pond, one time sitting at the bottom of the stairs with her head buried in her hands, and a final time sitting at a writing desk. As with Quint, Miss Jessel doesn’t interact with any of the characters.
Both children seem to like the Governess at first. They listen to stories from her life and involve her in their imaginative games. At some point, though, they start trying to ditch her, and they ask her frequently when their uncle will come to visit them again. They write several letters to their uncle, which the Governess keeps rather than mailing.
If the children can see the ghosts, they are not upset by or afraid of them.
Speculations and Questions
The book’s ambiguity raises several questions. Here are a few of mine:
Is the Governess’s father mentally ill? Is that why she hears “disturbing news” from home and refers to his “eccentricities”? Could she have inherited his illness?
Is the Governess attracted to Quint? Her specific description of his physique suggests she has scrutinized him closely, and she refers to him as handsome and “erect.”
Did Miss Jessel get pregnant, and did her baby die? Is that why she’s dressed in black? Or is she in mourning for Quint?
Can the children see the ghosts? (While they both deny it, I think they probably can see them; near the end, Miles mentions “the others,” which could refer to the servants but more likely refers to the ghosts.)
Do the children know about the affair between Quint and Miss Jessel? Miles makes roguish comments about women, and Flora plays her game with the stick and the hole right after Miss Jessel’s ghost first appears.
My Theory
Because the Governess would have had no way of knowing what Quint looks like otherwise, her detailed description of him is incontrovertible evidence that the ghosts are real. However, the book gives us no reason to suspect that they are evil or that they want to harm the children. Every time the ghosts appear, they simply watch the Governess and don’t interact with the children at all. In fact, the only harm to the children comes from the Governess herself. Her behavior throughout the book is creepy, clingy, and emotionally abusive: She accuses the children of being evil; refers to herself proudly as their “gaoler” and says “I had all but pinned the boy to my shawl”; constantly grabs, embraces, and kisses them; keeps Miles isolated at home rather than educating him properly; casts Flora off; and refuses to send their letters to their uncle—all disturbing actions that ultimately lead to Flora’s trauma and possibly to Miles’s death. The ghosts are real but the true horror is the Governess.
How about you, readers? Are you Team Real Ghosts or Team Hysterical Governess? (Or Another Team Entirely?) What questions did the novella raise for you? What did you find especially interesting? Do you agree with my theory, or do you have your own? Please share your thoughts in the comments!
The Tidbit
The Turn of the Screw is a challenging read because of its unreliable narrator and because it is filled with such vague, typically Jamesian musings as “Nothing was more natural than that these things should be the other things that they absolutely were not.” (This is a real sentence from the book. What can it possibly even mean?!) But at least we only have to learn five character names, unlike the situation with certain other novels I could mention.
Okay, I'm going to try to put my thoughts into words. This is SO HARD with this book - just the way the characters talk makes that impossibly difficult! Everything is only alluded to, almost never spoken outright. Even the moments of relief that the Governess describes as bringing things into the open feel like they're still obscuring the truth.
Some of this seems to be cultural - for example, the final confrontation suggested to me that part of the reason the Governess never confronted Miles about what he'd done at school was her own weird flightiness and insistence on putting him up on a pedestal. But in addition to that, she (and Mrs. Grose) have an equally strong reluctance to accuse him of anything, because it is Simply Not Done to directly accuse a gentleman of dishonorable conduct. Even suggesting he could be "vulgar" is a profound insult permissible only in the face of incontrovertible proof. And we *still* never actually learn what he said. Of course, James is using these obscuring rules of etiquette in the service of his narrative. But there were many times when I couldn't quite tell where the Governess' unreliability ended and an understandable-to-the-contemporary-reader genteel obfuscation began.
The Governess and Mrs. Grose's reluctance to speak about exactly what it was Quint and Jessel were supposed to have conspired to do to the children is the biggest gap, to me. This is a place where the understanding of class baked into the book is just totally foreign. I felt like there was so much I was intended to understand about Quint and Jessel's relationship, the circumstances of their parting, and their influence on the children that went completely over my head.
Maybe this is completely out of left field, or something I'm getting entirely from my own modern sensibilities - but I wondered early on if there was some implication that Quint and Jessel were, in some way, grooming or abusing the children. Maybe the idea that too much time around a "menial" and his scandalous girlfriend could turn children into evil monsters was totally commonplace at the time this was written -- maybe just hearing that a young upper-class boy hung out with a [gasp] servant-class rake would make people sob and faint with horror, and it's no worse than that. But I found myself looking for proof of my theory - wondering if Miles had done something unspeakable to other children, if the strange, manipulative "corruption" the Governess saw in them was a sign of psychological damage, if her delusion and overprotection was her being so overcome with horror at the idea, she was unable to cope.
While there are indeed ambiguities and mysteries to ponder, one point seemed immediately clear, the ghosts are real. I felt a sense of it in the setup, with the household characters hiding something, and the uncle claiming so strongly not to bother him with anything, as though he knew there would be supernatural trouble. But then the governess describes the ghost she's seen for the 2nd time to the housekeeper, who clearly recognizes the man as the deceased valet. (I would later find that exact argument used to counter the original proposal to the "insane governess" theory, proposed for the first time 40 years after the publication of the story.) Assuming the housekeeper is at that point not just making it up, for some reason giving the governess's oddly specific description of her ghost a foot in reality, we can only conclude she saw a real face.