Songs of Innocence and of Experience and of Laughter: The Governess's Crisis of Authority in 'The Turn of the Screw'
It would be uncontroversial to claim that the unnamed governess who narrates Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw sees herself as being in the middle of some sort of crisis that only she is capable of resolving; what is more contentious is the nature of the crisis itself—and perhaps its very existence: “Read one way, the governess is the virtuous heroine of a chilling ghost story; read another, she is neurotic and sexually repressed, doing more harm than good with her obsessive investigations into her charges’ relative virtue” (Kindig, 1373). From her perspective, innocence is a lack of worldly experience and proper raising of children entails preserving it as much as possible. Experience is demonized as a dangerous, corrupting force that children need sheltering from. When Miles and Flora become her charges, the governess is horrified to find they are not as innocent as she feels children of their age and social standing ought to be. Unwilling to recognize that innocence tends to fade quickly, the governess feels obliged to invent an explication for why the children are the way they are so that she can restore the innocence lost, and devise a strategy by which she can preserve the innocence left.
When the governess meets Miles and Flora, she is struck immediately by their beauty; indeed, she devotes much of her narration in this text to describing it, seemingly in awe: Flora was “the most beautiful child I had ever seen” and she is so struck by this that she “slept little that night” after meeting her (James, 161). When the governess learns Miles has been dismissed from his boarding school, she absolutely cannot accept the news as being just, despite having not even met Miles at this point. The children’s physical beauty is treated as a sign of their purity and inability to do anything wrong. The governess even goes so far as to suggest that it was the headmaster himself who must have been simply stupid, because Miles was so clearly incapable of serious wrongdoing: “My conclusion bloomed there with the real rose-flush of his innocence: he was only too fine and fair for the little horrid unclean school-world, and he had paid a price for it” (James, 174). She is completely incapable of viewing the children as capable of any poor behaviour done of their own accord; so external forces must be attributed to any missteps the children have made. But now that the governess herself is the external force most responsible for their behaviour, any continued mishaps might reflect badly upon her.
When the governess gets to know Miles and Flora, she quickly is forced to accept that they are not particularly well behaved; Miles somewhat more so than Flora, though they both behave oddly at times. In her desire to rectify this situation, the governess finds herself in what she perceives to be a crisis of authority. She recognizes that the correction of these behaviours she dislikes falls firmly upon herself, both by the nature of her profession and the fact that she is the only one of suitable social standing present to instruct the children. But because she does not want to blame herself, nor the children, for the discrepancy between what she thinks they are supposed to be like and what she wishes they are like pitches her into a state of panic, and she becomes desperate to find something else that could be found responsible for causing the problems. And so, she firstly places the blame on the people who raised the children before her. Notable is that the figure who ought to have been considered the most appropriate to raise Miles and Flora, their uncle—who is educated and of the upper class—has completely absented himself from their lives and upbringing, leaving the care of the children to a household of individuals of varied social stratums. Ms. Jessel, the former governess, was the closest they had come to an appropriate figure of authority; but her reputation was tarnished by her relationship to Peter Quint, the valet; who was of a lower class than she. It is suggested Quint had an inappropriate influence on Miles, and could have been a corrupting figure; but it is left ambiguous whether Quint actually did anything bad to Miles, or it was his lack of social standing which made their friendship unsavoury. Miles was sent to a boarding school after Jessel dies and the governess’s view is clearly that if anything bad happened there, it must have been somebody else’s fault and not Miles’. At the very least, there is a strong possibility that there was a lack of proper authority and oversight at the boarding school, where Miles was but one of many presumably young and rowdy one boys who could have gotten up to any amount of mischief.
The governess, at last, sees herself as the one who can step in and undo the harm done by this previous deficiency of authority; but when Miles and Flora do not perfectly and immediately accept her authority the way she feels they ought to have, she interprets it not as a natural and normal sign of youth; but as another sign of corruption. And because neither she, nor the children, can be held responsible for this corruption, another external agent must be held accountable for it; one that persists in the present instead of in the past. The ghostly figures emerge as means to explain any current oddities the children possess; there is much irony present in fact that in the governess’s own youthful innocence and lack of experience in dealing with children, she holds unrealistic expectations of what they ought to be like. The text stresses the governess’s own youth and naïveté; after all, this is her first job: “She was young, untried, nervous: it was a vision of serious duties and little company, of really great loneliness” (James, 159). The stress that she was under helps the reader understand why she might unconsciously invent such explications.
The governess’s lack of experience in working with children demonstrates itself when she interprets the simple joys of childhood as direct threats to her authority and control. In Patrick Kindig’s “The Laughing Child: Sex, Interpretation, and Laughter in Sigmund Freud’s ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw,” attention is paid to the role of Miles’ laughter at times when it is aimed at the governess’s attempts at asserting herself as a figure of authority. His laughter disrupts the power dynamics she feels ought to exist between them, in turn, challenging the authority she holds over him. What she interprets as a sign of bad behaviour entailing external corruption is just as easily interpreted as a boy having fun.
As Kindig points out, the first time the reader experiences Miles’ laugh, he is mocking the governess. In mocking her, he reveals that he cares little about her authority. In subsequent occurrences of Miles’ laughter in the face of her attempts at asserting authority, the governess becomes increasingly heavy-handed in her approach towards him, which only causes Miles’ laughter in the face of her authority to become more irreverent. Kindig writes,
…the more the governess tries to extract some sort of confession of… ‘wickedness’ from Miles, the more mysterious he becomes, answering her inquiries not with direct answers but with illegible laughter (1373).
Kindig’s analysis of Miles’ laughter begins with the scene where she lurks outside his bedroom door after his bedtime, and he invites her in. She is surprised that he heard her, and he mocks her surprise: “Why of course I heard you. Did you fancy you make no noise? You’re like a troop of cavalry!” (James, 221). ‘Beautiful laughter’ follows this exclamation. Kindig points out that this interaction is problematic for the governess in a handful of ways: it reveals he is unconcerned with his bedtime, which is a rejection of a rule she has placed upon him. And he is listening to her as much as she is listening to him; revealing her surveillance state can go both ways. This signifies that the power dynamics are not as one-sided as the governess’s plan depends on them to be. This complicates her plan, and contributes to the need on her end to continue imagining a source external to Miles that is corrupting him; instead of seeing him as what he is, a young boy, who is laughing and being playful. She reacts more and more extremely and dramatically to Miles’ laughter as the story goes on; to which Miles reacts with more irrational behaviour.
The story ends with what the governess perceives as Miles’ death; when they “were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped” (James, 250). The tale ends abruptly enough for the reader to wonder what happened after this scene. Kindig argues the death actually occurred; by his account, the governess smothered him with her embrace, and this serves as a metaphor for the way she tried to coddle him in life. While this reading is compelling, I personally do not find the text offered sufficient evidence to make a decisive statement about whether Miles actually perished or not. He might have just fainted; I also suspect that it is at least possible that he simply held his breath and pretended to perish, for the fun of scaring her.
My goal for this paper was not to completely prove one way or the other that the ghostly presences in The Turn of the Screw were but examples of the explained supernatural; I wish only to advance the possibility that they were but figments of the governess’s imagination, which came into existence to help her grapple with the difficulties she was shown to be having with her job, and her refusal to acknowledge any agency on behalf of the children for their own incomprehensible behaviour. By blaming any of their actions that confused her on supernatural forces, the governess does not have to confront a reality she appears to find even more terrifying than that of the possible existence of ghosts: that children often know and understand a lot more of this world than adults like to wish they did; and innocence lost may be irredeemable.
Works Cited
James, Henry. “The Turn of the Screw.” In The Turn of the Screw and Other Tales, ed. Kimberly C. Reed. Broadview, 2010.
Kindig, Patrick. “The Laughing Child: Sex, Interpretation, and Laughter in Sigmund Freud’s ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.” Textual Practice, vol. 32, no. 8, 2017, pp. 1365–1381., doi:10.1080/0950236x.2017.1310756.