The Fake Ghosts of “Turn of the Screw”
The Governess in “Turn of the Screw”, by Henry James, was a very insecure person who needed constant stimulation to be happy. Shortly after she arrives at Bly, the Governess begins to see two ghostly figures lurking around the house. The story is based around her struggles with these apparitions and their attempts to “take” the children. In reality, she simply created the ghosts in order to make herself happier. The ghosts allowed her to scare the residents of Bly into complete submission and take total control of the house. They also caused her to be the center of attention and receive a lot of sympathy from the maid, Mrs. Grose. Finally, they allowed the Governess to entertain herself by providing her with a much needed adventure. These ghosts were simply created by the Governess so that she could have a better stay at Bly, and she wrote this story to try to make them seem more real.
The Governess constantly felt a strong need for interaction and attention, both from the children and Mrs. Grose. She developed a strong relationship with these people due to the fact that she did not have a family of her own. She was a girl of twenty who dreamed about starting a family, so she hoped to create her own. She used the excuse of the ghosts to spend much of her time “protecting” the children, allowing her to be close to them and form a better relationship. Her more obvious use of this was with Mrs. Grose. She wanted to become a close friend of Mrs. Grose and used the fear of these spirits to draw them closer:
She slowly came back to me. “Miss Jessel – was infamous.” She once more took my hand in both her own, holding it as tight as if to fortify me against the increase of alarm I might draw from this disclosure. “They were both infamous,” she finally said. (James 38)
She used the ghosts to frighten her. The Governess talked about Miss Jessel in order to frighten her into a closer friendship. Before, she refused to talk about Miss Jessel or her relationship with Peter Quint, but this story scared her into confiding in the Governess a very deep secret that only made their relationship closer. She also did several actions that were specifically done to draw attention to her. This included the incident at the church. Miles, the boy, had just told her that he wanted to have a little more freedom. She was distraught and felt like her family was beginning to break apart. So she ran home in order to create a scene, hoping that it would make them feel sorry for her:
I had so perfectly expected the return of the others to be marked by a demonstration that I was freshly upset at having to find them merely dumb and discreet about my desertion. Instead of gaily denouncing and caressing me they made no allusion to my having failed them, and I was, for the time, on perceiving that she too said nothing, to study Mrs. Grose’s odd face. (James 70)
She had hoped to create a grand scheme that would cause them to focus their attention on her, and she was really disappointed when none of them mentioned her abandoning them. The Governess hoped to gain attention by doing something as obvious and strange as leaving them at church, but it failed. This incident also ended with another appearance of Miss Jessel. The story from this made sure that Mrs. Grose gave her the attention that she desperately wanted. She created the ghosts that she saw in the story as a device she could use to gain attention.
The Governess led a very boring life. She created these ghosts to add a few new elements to her life that made it much more interesting. While working, she loved to romanticize her job. She wasn’t just raising two children. She was bravely protecting them against the many corruptions of the world. She was sparing them the trauma of fighting these spirits:
And the circumstance that these things only made them more interesting was not by itself a direct aid to keeping them in the dark. I trembled lest they should see that they were so immensely more interesting. Putting things at worst, at all events, as in meditation I so often did, any clouding of their innocence could only be – blameless and foredoomed as they were – a reason the more for taking risks. There were moments when I knew myself to catch them up by an irresistible impulse and press them to my heart. (James 45)
She loved to create these wonderful stories and live these exciting adventures. Because of this, she would create wonderful and exciting stories in her mind and live out these vast quests that she always wanted to have. She created these ghosts to have adventures when she thirsted for excitement. She had a moment like this right before she meet the ghost of Peter Quint on the stairway:
One evening – with nothing to lead up or prepare it – I felt the cold touch of the impression that had breathed on me the night of my arrival and which, much lighter then as I have mentioned, I should probably have made little of in memory had subsequent sojourn been less agitated. I had not gone to bed: I sat reading by a couple of candles. (James 47)
On that night, she was bored. She had a wanted to go out and have a bit of an adventure. The cold touch was her thirst for excitement. Things were starting to get a little boring for her after all of the initial excitement that she had experienced. Her subsequent sojourn involved a frightening and exciting encounter with the mysterious Peter Quint. She felt the itch for adventure, so she created her own. Finally, she received a lot of excitement from her encounters with these beings. Her first experience with Peter Quint was followed by a glorious expedition to discover his identity:
Was there a “secret” at Bly – a mystery of Udolpho or an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected confinement? I can’t say how long I turned it over or how long, in a confusion of curiosity and dread, I remained where I had had my collision; I only recall that when I re-entered the house darkness had quite closed in. Agitation in the interval, certainly had held me and driven me, for I must, in circling about the place, have walked three miles. (James 21, 22)
She loved the idea of there being a mystery that she could solve. She explored for hours in hopes of finding something exciting in the House. Bly was simply too boring for her, she wanted it to have a secret that she could find. When there was nothing for her to do, she created an adventure. The ghosts in the story were devices with which she added excitement to her life.
Finally, she used the ghosts to better control the people around her. She always wanted to have total control of the situation. The Governess feared that the children and Mrs. Grose would gain their freedom and she would lose the control that she had over them. She could use the stories as an excuse to restrain the children and carefully keep them under her watchful eye. She used a passive aggressive attitude to manipulate those around her. The Governess even made sure that she was the one writing the story, not an outsider like the bailiff (James 72). She used blatant scare tactics to ensure that Mrs. Grose was constantly afraid of the ghosts that resided in the house. This caused Mrs. Grose to seek friendship and leadership from the confident Governess. It made her submit to the will of the Governess and follow her led. The Governess loved this control and did everything that she could to keep it. She would even make up stories in order to arouse a greater sense of fear:
“Oh yes, we may sit here and look at them, and they may show off to us there to their fill; but even while they pretend to be lost in their fairy-tale they’re steeped in their vision of the dead restored to them. He’s not reading to her,” I declared; “they’re talking of them – they’re talking horrors! 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; but it has only made me more lucid, made me get hold of still other things.” (James 57)
She used frightening stories like these to further scare Mrs. Grose. The frightened woman had few options other than following the led of the confident Governess. When confronted with such a grim tale, she would have needed guidance the Governess could provide that. The Governess also tried to keep the children under her control. She was greatly rattled when they began to show the stirrings of rebellion and freedom. Once Flora, the girl, stood at the window of her room and stared out into the courtyard. She ignored the Governess and made her run to another window to see what was happening. She simply saw Miles standing out there. It was all an elaborate plot to show that Miles could be “bad” (James 53-56). She was also so frightened when Miles asked for more freedom on their way to church, that she actually ran home. The Governess didn’t want these children to become independent because she was afraid that they would eventually leave her (James 64-67). She wanted her family to be perfect and she greatly feared the independence that they were showing. Flora was beginning to run off on her own, and Miles openly asked for more independence and more freedom. She didn’t know what to do so she kept increasing the intensity of the ghost encounters. She even claimed that Miss Jessel had actually possessed Flora and made her run away. She continuously tried to invent new stories that would further allow her to control Mrs. Grose and give her an excuse to restrict the children. She ultimately realized that this wouldn’t work though. “‘My dear child, how can I help minding? Though I’ve renounced all claim to your company – you’re so beyond me — I at least greatly enjoy it. What else should I stay on for?’” She said this right before Peter Quint arrived and “killed” Miles (James 97). The Governess had surrendered to the fact that Miles would never again be happy to live under her restrictive rule. He wanted to be a free man and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Peter Quint began to appear before her and she started to panic because she knew that the ghosts wouldn’t help her keep her control. She ultimately decided to smother Miles by holding him to her chest, “The grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I him, yes, I held him – it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.” Miles had fallen away from her by choosing to take an independent path, so she had to kill him to destroy the rebellious soul that possessed his heart. She had already lost him, and she knew that he would probably teach Flora to rebel too. The Governess was driven to murder, because she had lost her control. The ghosts were vital for keeping Mrs. Grose afraid and under the spell of the Governess. They justified many restrictions on the children, that were meant to keep them obedient and under her control, but they failed. Miles still wanted to be free and his will was starting to spread to Flora, so she had to kill him.
The Governess was a very insecure woman who was thrust into an unfamiliar situation. She was young and wanted to live a perfect life. The ghosts were created to help her live that life. They made sure that she was the center of attention at the house. Fighting these spirits gave her a quest to accomplish and created an exciting life for her at Bly. Finally, she tried to use the ghost to control Mrs. Grose and restrict the children. The insecurities of one woman cause all of the residents of Bly to suffer greatly. She created a world of terror because she couldn’t deal with the true reality of the world.