Summary: Prologue
An unnamed narrator describes a house party at which ghost
stories are told. The guests agree that a story in which a ghost
visits a child is especially eerie, and an older guest named Douglas
indicates that he knows a story in which a ghost visits two children.
Everyone present wants to hear the story, but Douglas insists that
he has to send his servant to his house in London to get it, as
the story is in written form, penned many years earlier by Douglas’s
sister’s governess, with whom Douglas was apparently infatuated.
The manuscript arrives, and Douglas provides some background
before reading it to the party. When the young woman who wrote the
manuscript was twenty years old and just finished with her education,
she answered an advertisement for a position as governess. The employer
was a rich, attractive bachelor responsible for educating his orphaned
niece and nephew, who lived at his remote country house. The position
was isolated and lonely, and the bachelor stipulated that she must
deal with all problems by herself and never seek to correspond with
him. Nevertheless, the young woman accepted the position, perhaps
because of her attraction to her employer.
Summary: Chapter I
The governess’s narrative opens with her drive to Bly,
a country home in Essex, a county in eastern England. Here she meets
the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose, and the younger of her two charges,
Flora, an exceptionally beautiful and charming little girl. From
her room, the governess thinks she hears the footsteps and crying
of a child in the distance but dismisses them, optimistic about
the opportunity to teach and shape her beautiful charge.
Talking with Mrs. Grose, the governess asks about Flora’s
brother. Mrs. Grose emphasizes the boy’s good looks, and the governess
remarks impulsively upon her employer’s handsomeness. Mrs. Grose
tells the governess that Flora’s brother will arrive on Friday,
at which the governess decides that she and Flora will meet him
together. She spends the entire next day with Flora, who shows the
new governess her home with delight. Summing up her feelings in
retrospect, the governess expresses her then-optimistic attitude
toward her new position in contrast to her present feelings toward
Bly as “ugly,” a drifting ship of which she herself was at the helm.
Analysis
By the time we finish the prologue and begin the governess’s
narrative, we know that the story to come is a ghost story and that
it involves a governess who is in love with her employer. Ordinarily,
given this basic story premise, we would expect the story to be
a gothic romance and to have an unrealistic plot, primarily in the sense
that it would contain supernatural elements but also in the idea
that a governess might aspire to rise above her station and win
the love of a rich gentleman—something that happens in gothic romances
such as Jane Eyre but not in real life. In other
words, to read a story like this, we would normally be prepared
to put aside our cynicism about whether these events could actually
happen and simply enjoy the story. The main function of the prologue,
however, is to tell us not to do this.
The prologue depicts an audience for the governess’s story
that is adult, worldly, and cynical rather than naïve or sentimental.
The narrator makes it clear that some of the guests are more sophisticated
than others and that those who remain to hear Douglas’s story are
a select group. This group is characterized as “arch,” meaning deliberately
or even forcedly ironic and playful. The group’s members are fairly
aggressive about reading between the lines of what Douglas says
to draw sexual inferences, as Mrs. Griffin does about Douglas and
the governess. The guest who wisecracks about the former governess
dying of “so much respectability” is insinuating that the former
governess is less than respectable, perhaps morally and sexually
loose. This guest treats Douglas’s story skeptically, even cynically,
refusing to take things at face value and ready to make inferences
of a sexual nature. When we learn more about this former governess—Miss
Jessel—we see that this guest is absolutely right and perhaps conclude
that we are intended to read The Turn of the Screw in
the same way: viewing the characters realistically rather than romantically,
treating the story skeptically, and reading between the lines for
sexual overtones.
