A classic ghost novella. A never-named governess goes to an old house to take charge of a little girl, Flora, and her older brother Miles, who has been expelled from school though no-one is quite sure why. The governess then starts seeing apparitions which she decides are the ghosts of valet Peter Quint and his paramour, the last governess Miss Jessel, who were considered by housekeeper Mrs Grose to have had too much influence on the children. But are the ghosts real or is the hysterical governess hallucinating? Are the children naughty or in league with devils? Why was Miles expelled (the governess tells us that the school say was was "an injury to others"; what does this mean?)? And have the children been damaged by their experiences of the ghosts when they were still alive?
The book is brilliantly written. Narrated by the governess, a classic early example of an unreliable narrator, the book is full of ambiguities that are never resolved. How, for example, did Quint and Jessel die? Miss Jessel dies while on a holiday (reading between the lines she is pregnant by Quint and dies having his baby but this is never stated). As for her lover: “Peter Quint was found ... stone dead on the road from the village: a catastrophe explained - superficially at least - by a visible wound to his head” and it is assumed he has, in liquor, slipped on the icy road but the words "superficially at least" allow the possibility that there is a more sinister interpretation
The governess is a hysterical character (although she is described as "a most charming person ... my sister’s governess ... the most agreeable person I’ve ever known in her position ... awfully clever and nice” in a frame narrative by someone who appears to have had a crush on her when he was a boy) who has immense mood swings. She is convinced that 'the master' has fallen in love with her at first sight, as she clearly has with him. One moment she believes that the children are paragons of innocent perfection and the next that they are in league with the devil. When she explains her self it is in long, convoluted and complex sentences in which words are used in unusual contexts (I wasn't quite sure is this was just Henry James whose prose style is sometimes fiendishly complicated). She repeatedly jumps to conclusions: “He was looking for little Miles ... But how do you know? ... I know, I know, I know!” (Ch 5). In dialogue she repeatedly interrupts her interlocutor and finishes their sentences for them (for example when the housekeeper, meaning Miles, says “Surely you don’t accuse him -” but before she can say what Miles shouldn't be accused of the governess says “Of carrying on an intercourse that he conceals from me?”), thus putting words into their mouth and so validating her own opinions, whilst leaving the reader uncertain as to what they wanted to say. (All dialogue is naturalistic, so that people rarely ever make definitive statements.)
The book has provided opportunities for debate for generations of scholars and the discussion in the Eastbourne Central U3A English Novel group had a very stimulating discussion which covered a number of topics.
- One member insisted that James had been purposely ambiguous and so trying to work out what 'really' happened missed the point.
- One member felt sorry for the two children who had suffered repeated bereavements: they had been forced to leave India (where they might have been very close to the servants) on the death of their parents and had then suffered the death of their uncle; they were now living under the guardianship of another uncle who refused to have anything to do with them and had suffered the death of the two servants who had looked after them most closely: Quint and Jessel. Miles had then been sent to school. The children were therefore likely to be traumatised, which might explain all sorts of behaviours.
- There was the member who suggested that all these deaths was no more than a plot device so that the two children would be at the mercy of the mad governess and the single protective figure of the illiterate housekeeper, Mrs Grose.
- Several members saw this as in the tradition of gothic literature. The narrator refers to "Udolpho" (the Mysteries of Udolpho was perhaps the first work of gothic literature, written by Ann Radcliffe) and there is also reference to “an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement” which suggests either Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte or A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family by Sheridan Le Fanu. There was one member who felt the entire story was a sort of parody of Jane Eyre: there is a governess in love with the master and something sinister going on upstairs.
Several members thought that the children had been sexually abused by Quint and Jessel and that this was the reason that Miles was sent home from school. Clearly, Henry James could not write openly about sexual abuse of children in the dying days of the nineteenth century when the book was written. But the way the governess set up the children (Flora is described by the narrator as the “most beautiful child”, and to possess “extraordinary charm”, and “without a sign of uncomfortable consciousness, with the deep sweet serenity indeed of one of Raphael's holy infants”; of Miles the narrator says: “To gaze into the depths of blue of the child’s eyes and pronounce their loveliness a trick of premature cunning was to be guilty of a cynicism in preference to which I naturally preferred to abjure my judgement.”; Ch 8) may be a sign that Henry James is critiquing the Victorian paradigm of childhood innocence. The idea that Miles is expelled for being "an injury to others" fits the interpretation that he has somehow morally subverted his schoolmates (he says he told his friends things and they told their friends ... ?). Mrs Grose hints at improper influence but gives it a class spin: “For a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually together ... she liked to see young gentlemen not forget their station.” (Ch 8) To support this theory it was pointed out that Henry James was the brother of William James the philosopher and psychologist and this may have given him an insight into children, although he never fathered any himself. - Some members suggested that Miles in particular was just a little boy seeking the freedom to be a little boy and that he felt smothered by the governess.
- Some people hated the sudden ending and thought that the frame narrative should have been resumed to remove some of the perplexities of the story but most members thought the sudden ending was perfect. I myself have used sudden endings in my novels Motherdarling and Bally and Bro and the epilogue in The Kids of God is designed to challenge the reader.
- But the biggest debate of all was: were the ghosts real?
- Immediately before her first sighting (of Peter Quint), the governess has been imagining meeting the master with whom she has fallen in love. “It would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone. Someone who would appear there at the turn of a path and would stand before me and smile and approve. I didn’t ask more than that ... What arrested me on the spot ... was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!” (Ch 3) This seems to suggest that the governess has conjured the ghost out of her imagination.
- She says, talking of the children: “I walked in a world of their invention” (Ch 5). This suggests that she is susceptible to suggestion which in turn implies that the ghosts aren't real.
- “There was no ambiguity in anything: none whatever at least in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should see” (Ch 6) and this is the point where she has her second sighting, this time of the other ghost.
- When, in chapter 20, the governess, accompanied by Flora and Mrs Grose, sees Mrs Jessel the others don't see anything. “What a dreadful turn, to be sure, Miss! Where on earth do you see anything?” says Mrs Grose (I love the word ‘turn’: another and another and another turn of the screw). This event leads to Mrs Grose taking charge of Flora (presumably at Flora's, frightened, request) and keeping her away from the governess.
- In the last few pages, Miles doesn't see the ghost either. The governess believes she has prevented this (so protecting him): “At last, by my success, his sense was sealed and his communication stopped: he knew that he was in presence but he knew not of what, and knew still less that I also was and that I did know.” When Peter Quint appears, Miles asks “Is she here?” (presumably thinking about Miss Jessel. “His head made the movement of a baffled dog’s on a scent and then gave a frantic little shake for air and light, he was at me in a white rage, bewildered, glaring vainly over the place and missing wholly" Even after Miles, in response to a leading question from the governess, says identifies Peter Quint "his face gave again, round the room, its confused supplication. ‘Where’?” Miles still can't see the ghost. He never will.
Selected quotes:
- “He seems to like us young and pretty!” says the governess, referring to the master who she has fallen in love with on first sight and whom she is never going to see again, and the housekeeper replies “Oh he did ... it was the way he liked everyone!” and this use of the past tense tells us that she is referring to Peter Quint and then she corrects herself “I mean that’s his way - the master’s” (Ch 2)
- "I was struck, throughout our little tour, with her confidence and courage, with the way, in empty chambers and dull corridors, on crooked staircases that made me pause and even on the summit of an old machicolated square tower that made me dizzy, her morning music, her disposition to tell me so many more things than she asked, rang out and led me on.” (Ch 1)
- “I learnt something - at first certainly - that had not been one of the teachings of my small smothered life; learnt to be amused, and even amusing, and not to think of the morrow” (Ch 3)
- “And then there was consideration - and consideration was sweet.” (Ch 3)
- “An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred.” (Ch 3) I'm intrigued by 'privately bred'. Surely she means 'privately brought up'. Her thoughts seem to have been infiltrated by thoughts of sex.
- “I was in receipt in these days of disturbing letters from home, where things were not going well.” (Ch 4)
- “The silence itself ... became the element into which I saw the figure disappear.” (Ch 10)
- “She was a magnificent monument to the blessing of a want of imagination.” (Ch 11)
- “He could do what he liked, with all his cleverness to help him, so long as I should continue to defer to the old tradition of the criminality of those caretakers of the young who minister to superstitions and fears.” (Ch 11)
- “I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it's a wonder I’m not. What I’ve seen would have made you do; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things.” (Ch 12)
- “They’re not mine - they’re not ours. They’re his and they’re hers.” (Ch 12)
- “It revealed a real acceptance of my further proof of what, in the bad time - for there had been a worse even than this! - must have occurred.” (Ch 12)
- “Another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue” (Ch 22)
- "Peter Quint - you devil!" (Ch 24) But does the devil refer to the valet or the new governess?
A literary tour de force.
October 2022; 121 pages
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