Something is amiss in Bly. The nameless Governess has always been a person of interest in literature. She has been analyzed time and time again from a trusting standpoint; taking everything she says at face value. Taken with no thought of deception and that ghosts are real and the Governess’ is attempting to protect Miles, not harm him. Also from a psychological or Freudian perspective indicating she was mentally disturbed and kills Miles. Whether the Governess was simply a confused youth, thrust into a position beyond her ability and is further saddled with the tasks of protecting her two charges with ghosts or a manipulative shrew who means nothing but harm to those around her because her mental state is questionable. The Governess is mad.
In class it had been repeatedly suggested that the youth of the Governess is partly to blame for her inability to cope and manage her job and this contributes to her down cycle of lunacy. In reality for that time period in history she was not offered a position that many other women her age were not capable of and doing as well. Laura Ingalls Wilder was a school teacher from 1882-1885, she was fifteen when she started teaching and only eighteen by time she had finished because she had married ("Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home & Museum"). However, by today’s standards maturity and age and readiness would not be something we would consider of a woman younger in that field until, perhaps, the age of twenty-five. That is not as it was more than 100 years ago, women were starting families and in careers’ at much earlier ages.
The Governess is an entirely unreliable narrator. The potential for things to have been fabricated to make her own self look better. Also to prove to herself h...
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... of protecting him. Whether she knew that this is what she had done or not will never be solved, the mystery remains.
Works Cited
“Enotes.com" Henry James, The Turn of the Screw - Introduction. 2010.
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Heilman, Robert B. "The Freudian reading of The Turn of the Screw.” 1947. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999. Print.
James, Henry, and Peter Beidler. The turn of the Screw. Bedford/St Martins, 2003. Print.
"Laura's History." Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Home & Museum. 2004. Laura Ingalls Wilder
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...person. When these two counterexamples are dissected further, many flaws begin to surface and can be easily viewed differently. In the case of “Bailey Boy”, it can be observed as another sly tactic used to gain more sympathy towards the grandmother. Even at the end when it looked like she was showing compassion towards the Misfit, it can be perceived as her last desperate attempt to save her own life. This was highly plausible since in the beginning of the paragraph, the grandmother noticed that the Misfit had a sensitive spot towards religion, which she could have used against him in order to set herself free. However, her attempt to “comfort” the criminal backfired and led her to her death. These theories can all be debated depending on your outlook of the story, which would really decide whether the grandmother was being sincere or frolicking with the devil.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James continues to stir up an immense amount of controversy for such a short novel. Making a definite, educated decision on the actual truth considering the countless inquiries that develop while reading this story proves more difficult than winning a presidential election. That being understood, taking one particular side on any argument from a close reading of the story seems impossible, because the counter argument appears just as conceivable. Any side of the controversy remains equally disputable considerably supported by textual evidence from the novel. One issue which, like the rest, can be answered in more than one ways is why Mrs. Grose believes 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 equals 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 we...
The issue whether the governess was insane or not may never be solved. Not only because critics seem to be able to find as much evidence as possible to prove their arguments but also, the reliability of the account of the governess colors the whole story with great ambiguity. We are not certain of the state of mind of the governess when she wrote down the story and when she related the story to Douglas. However, as we closely examine the state of mind of the governess, her reliability does appear to be in question. Beidler provided two readings of The Turn of the Screw and in the second one he declared: ¡§the governess saw only what she wanted to see¡¨ (Beidler 9). She was so exhausted from her prolonged insomnia that she envisioned a story with ghosts for herself to fulfill her growth as a governess.
In the governess's insane pseudo-reality and through her chilling behavior, she managed to bring downfall to Flora and Miles, the children of Bly. With compulsively obsessive actions, irrational assumptions, and demented hallucinations, the governess perceived ghosts bearing evil intentions were attempting to corrupt and destroy the children she had taken the role of care for. In reality, the governess herself brought tragedy to the children through her own selfishness and insanity.
The governess is sane because she spots Peter Quint on the watch tower staring at her. Peter Quint is a dead employee at Bly who the governess clearly detects. She exclaims that “[h]e did stand there!-but high up, beyond
Freud, S., Strachey, J., Freud, A., Rothgeb, C., & Richards, A. (1953). The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (1st ed.). London: Hogarth Press.
...y the governess brings him up, but also to “all the rest.” These equivocal words refer to the initiation to sex by the governess, which is reinforced by Mile’s pointing out that she “knows what a boy wants!” After Mrs. Grose and Flora leave Bly, the two are once again alone, faced with a tyrannical and silent environment leaving the governess thinking they epitomize “some young couple…on their wedding night.”
When the governess first arrives at the small town of Bly to begin her assignment over the niece and nephew of her employer, she describes her self as having gone through many ups and downs in terms of her emotional and possibly mental state. She says, "I remember the whole thing as a succession of flights and drops a little see saw of write throbs and the wrong" (page 121). It appears evident even from the beginning of the story that the governess is not in an 'even keeled' state of mind, neither stable nor calm enough to hand the task set before her in any means.
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
...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.
Contemporary Psychology, 36, 575-577. Freud, S. (1961). The Species of the World. The Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. London: The Hogarths.
Past Biography. 1995 ed. Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction Of Psychoanalysis. New York: Boni and Liveright,
Ignorance is present in her behaviour here because she never really considered him as a family member but an outsider, and although he is a man she knew all her life and he could not have possibly committed such crime, she is not letting anything convince her.
The "Freud-Flies Letters." Freud Fliess Letters -. Ed. J.M. Masson. N.p., n.d. Web.
Wilson, Sarah. "Sigmund Freud and the oedipal complex." The Guardian. N.p., 8 Mar. 2009. Web. 1 Apr. 2014. .