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Kate chopin literary criticism
Freedom and restraint in kate chopin's short stories
Freedom and restraint in kate chopin's short stories
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I believe The Governess of the story was a heroine and was genuinely trying to save the kids from the ghosts of the past. While the story does a remarkable job at keeping the story ambiguous about her state of mind, the governess seems to truly trying to protect the children. She doesn’t want to upset their uncle and be fired from the job. The ghosts have a history there and the fact that they are attempting to capture the kids is plausible. As the story develops the ghost of Miss Jessel seemingly became more intensely angry with the governess’s effort to keep Flora away from her. The governess was in a situation where the supernatural beings where real, but the children and the maid either made a consistent effort to act naïve or they did …show more content…
In one of her encounter later encounters with Mrs. Jessel, who spent most of her time around Flora when she resided at the house, was an intense one. Miss Jessel could have had a racy relationship with Peter Quaint, and while she was writing a love letter in the schoolroom The Governess thought she’d been using her pen in her desk. Angered by that and because she, Mrs. Jessel, was doing something The Governess wanted to do only she wanted to send her letter to the uncle. The Governess did not enjoy the thought of becoming like Miss Jessel as seen when she quickly climbed off the stairs because she was in a similar physical position as she envisioned Miss Jessel in earlier. Miss Jessel also had evil implications such as wearing all black and possed the appearance of being weighed down by something, so naturally as a heroine would do The Governess tried to keep Flora away from Miss Jessel which could have upset her. In the end The Governess was able to save Flora from the ghost, but like her brother ill consequences took place as Flora fell sick. Flora also did not recall the ghost at all likely because she was not in control her body during that period of
In conclusion, it is not the ghosts, as the governess suspected, that are corrupting the children, but the governess herself, through her continually worsening hysteria that is corrupting the children. Both Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are not real ghosts that have the peculiar habit of appearing before the governess and the governess alone but they are merely the signs of the fragmenting mental state of the governess.
As humans, we can’t help but to jump to conclusions, but the governess’s assumptions are too misguided and are taken too far without substantial proof. When she first arrives at Bly, she automatically infers that Ms. Grose, although not showing any hint of it, is relieved that the governess is there and simply “wish[es] not to show it” (7). This could be the case, or, as it would seem to any sane person, Ms. Grose could just be unmoved by the governess’s arrival. Her second assumption with Ms. Grose is when they agree on one thing and the governess assumes that “on every question [they should] be quite at one” (9). Some people can hope that a person may have similar ideas to them, but they wouldn’t expect to agree on everything all the time. People understand that we all have different views, but obviously the governess does not. Then, the governess goes on to guess that Miles got kicked out of school because “he’s an injury to others” (11). She has no specific proof that shows he was kicked out for any reason but she is quick to make the inference. She hasn’t talked to the school, the uncle, or even Miles himself to find out what happened, but instead goes along with her own imagination. She also makes many assumptions about the ghost when she hasn’t even been talking to them. She deduces the ghost of Peter Quint “was looking for Miles” but she only had a feeling to base that off of
When Peter Quint and Miss Jessel were alive, they destroyed the innocence of Flora and Miles as well. It is suggested many times throughout the book, that Miss Jessel, the former governess, and Peter Quint, the vallette, were having an affair. Because this novella was written in the Victorian Era, it was not proper to write about subjects such as sex or intimacy period; therefore it is unclear about what really happened. However, it is clear that the children witnessed this affair and corruptness between their governess and vallette because Henry James confirms it through this passage, “What it was most impossible to get rid of was the cruel idea that, whatever I had seen, Miles and Flora had seen more - things terrible and unguessable and that sprang from dreadful passages of intercourse in the past” (James, 76). Although the governess could not fix the innocence that had already been destroyed by the inappropriate affair between Miss Jessel and Peter Quint, she certainly tried her hardest to save what innocence was
One issue which, like the rest, can be answered in more than one way is why Mrs. Grose believes in the Governess when she tells her about her ghost encounters. Usually one would second-guess such outlandish stories as the ones that the governess shares throughout the story, yet Mrs. Grose is very quick to believe our borderline-insane narrator. One of the explanations for such behavior could be the underlying fact that Mrs. Grose and the governess have a similar socio-economic background, therefore making them somewhat equal even if the governess does not always seem to think that way. This fact makes them susceptible to trusting and believing each other, and to believing that the ghosts are there, for the people that the ghosts are presenting used to be servants and therefore from a similar socio-economic background. To add on to that, Bruce Robbins proposes in his Marxist criticism of The Turn of the Screw that the idea of a ghost is synonymous to that of a servant, subconsciously making the two lower-class workers of Bly more vulnerable to believe that the ghosts were real; in other words, servants were ghosts....
What if the governess never really saw the apparitions of Quint and Miss Jessel? The governess’ psychosis created the images of the pair from Mrs. Grose’s tales about them having something to protect the children from. After ‘seeing’ Quint and Miss Jessel late at night, she frequently visits the children’s rooms to check on them. Oftentimes when she visits the children, she lingers for a while.
The governess sees a woman on the other side of the lake and jumps to the conclusion that Flora has seen her and is choosing to act like she didn’t. The child was playing with a boat and had her back turned to the lake. Why would she think that she had to have seen her? There is no proof and does not even ask the child if she saw anything. She automatically assumes it’s Miss Jessel, the previous governess who died and that she is after Flora. She tells her story to Mrs. Grose drawing her in more deeply into believing her crazy hallucinations and Mrs. Grose asks her if she is sure its Miss Jessel and the governess replies “Then ask Flora—she’s sure!” and then immediately comes back to say “no, for God’s sake don’t! She’ll say she isn’t—she’ll lie” ((James 30). She comes to the conclusion that the child will lie about it when there is no reason to suspect that she would. Again, this is her jumping to conclusions, because there is not any proof to say that the children have seen or know anything about the ghost’s. “Thus a very odd relationship develops between the governess and the children, for the more she loves them and pities them and desires to save them, the more she begins to suspect them of treachery, until at last she is convinced that they, in league with the ghosts, are ingeniously tormenting her’ (Bontly 726). “The ghosts appear, thus, when the governess is both aware of the corruption which threatens the children and convinced of her own power to preserve them untainted” (Aswell 53). It’s the governess fabricating all this up in her mind again so she can play the part of
However, the governess begins to become increasingly morally questionable as the story goes on, due to her seemingly more and more erratic theories and sightings concerning the ghosts. The
with Mrs. Grose, she learns that they are ghosts and former employees of the Gentleman
The only thing that mattered in her life was Drake. When running from Agi one night, she sees Drake. “Drake is ahead of me, and I have remembered things. Drake makes me remember” (208). Unfortunately, it was dark and Flora did not know where he went and had to wait to see him again. She rushes out of Agi’s house the next morning and finds herself getting help from Henny, a woman who works at a boots shop. Flora was supposed to use Henny’s money to go get some breakfast, but instead, she heads to find
...t want to be the only one who does. It is another feeble attempt to prove her sanity to herself and to others. However, because she “is so easily carried away”, she soon believes that the children do in fact see the ghosts by reading into their every remark and behavior. By piecing all of this together, the governess proves to herself that she is not insane. The governess in The Turn of the Screw, is a highly unreliable narrator. From the beginning of the story, her energetic imagination is displayed to the reader. With this knowledge alone, it would not be irrational to conclude that she had imagined the appearances of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. However, these facts in addition to her unsubstantiated inferences allow the reader to intelligently label the governess as an unreliable narrator. Works Cited Poupard, Dennis. “Henry James.” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism: Volume 24. Ed. Paula Kepos. Detroit: Gale research.; 1990. 313-315.
Women should be powerful, beautiful and intelligence. Nevertheless, women in the eighteenth century were portrayed as servants did not have any say in anything just like the story of an hour by Kate Chopin, where even in a good marriage you could not do the things you wanted to do. What if their husbands died what would come of them? How would they feel? And the irony of gaining freedom but losing everything?
... let Flora run free, he “[speaks] with resignation, even good humour, the words which absolved and dismissed [her] for good. ‘She’s only a girl’ ” (114) to which she states “I didn’t protest that, even in my heart. Maybe it was true” (114).
The governess only hardly indicates that she is scared the ghosts will physically destroy or kill the children. In fact, Miles’s death comes as a surprise to us as readers. This is because we are unrehearsed in the book to think of the ghosts as a physical threat. Till she sends Flora away, the governess does not seem to consider removing the children from the ghosts. She even does not try to scare away the ghost from the house. Instead, the governess’s abilities focus on the ‘corruption’ of the children by the ghost. Before she could realize about quint, the governess thinks that Miles has been corrupting other kids. Although the word corruption is an understatement that permits the governess to remain unclear about what she means. The clear meaning of corruption in this text means exposure to information of sex. According to governess, the children’s exposure to knowledge of sex is a far more dangerous aspect than confronting the living dead or being killed. Therefore, her attempt to save the children is to find out what they know, to make them admit rather than to forecast what might happen to them in the future. Her fear of innoce...
It seems that the governess starts seeing ghosts at the same time she desires to be in love. The young governess is instantly attracted to the "handsome, bold and pleasant" (p. 7) bachelor uncle of the orphaned children by whom she is hired. It also seems that she has an overwhelmingly obsession with how beautiful a person is. This overpowering feeling was the original incentive for her accepting the job as governess. The governess gives out the sense at the beginning of the novel that she may have been a little desperate seeing as she knew hardly anything about coming to Essex and jumped right at the chance of it. Her craving to ...
...and her attitude to her father and his work began to change. So while the killing was underway her and her brother were picking up sticks to make a teepee out of. Suddenly there was a lot of commotion and Flora was running free. Her father told her to shut the gate. She ran to the gate and just had just enough time to close it. Instead of closing the gate she opened it wide and let the horse run free. Laird got there just in time to see her do it. When her father and Henry showed up they thought that she didn’t get there in time. They simply got the gun and the knives they used and jumped in the truck. On the way out they stopped and picked up Laird who was begging to go.