Summary: Chapter IV
Confused, the governess wonders what sort of mystery Bly
might hold. Meeting Mrs. Grose at the house, she points to the evening’s
beauty as her reason for staying out so late. For days, the governess
reflects on her encounter with the intruder. Meanwhile,
her time spent with Miles and Flora goes smoothly. Still wondering about
the cause of the boy’s expulsion, she decides finally that he was
too refined for the “horrid, unclean school-world” and had been
punished for it. As much as the governess enjoys her charges, she
is concerned that both children are impersonal, seemingly without
history.
One Sunday, the governess comes down the stairs to meet
Mrs. Grose for church, only to meet a disturbing visage at the window.
It is the intruder from the tower, staring intensely at
her from outside the dining-room window. The governess runs outside
to confront the man, but he has vanished. She turns to the window
to stand where he had stood. At that moment, Mrs. Grose enters the
dining room and is startled by the image of the governess staring
in from outside.
Summary: Chapter V
Mrs. Grose, breathless, asks the governess why she looks
so frightened. The governess responds by saying she cannot go to
church and claims that what Mrs. Grose saw was not half as bad as
what she herself saw just a few moments ago. She then bewilders
and frightens her colleague by detailing her experience with the intruder
at the window and, earlier, at the tower. Calling the man “a horror,”
the governess tells Mrs. Grose that she feels compelled to stay
and watch their home instead of going to church. Mrs. Grose asks
what the man looked like, and the governess describes him as without
a hat, with very red hair and a pale face. Mrs. Grose suddenly makes
an expression of recognition and names the intruder as
Peter Quint, her employer’s former valet. At the governess’s questioning,
Mrs. Grose reveals that Quint was in charge of Bly last year until his
death.
Analysis
The governess’s first thoughts after seeing Peter Quint
are to compare her situation to the plots of two popular gothic
novels with romantic heroines, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries
of Udolpho and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—the
latter about a governess who marries her employer, which we know
to be this governess’s fantasy. However, the effect
of these references is not to make the governess’s story seem more
like those novels, but just the opposite. The fact that she is inclined
to see herself in terms of these gothic romances reminds us that this
is not a romance; that those are fantasies rather
than reality; and that even though we know that what we are reading
is a work of fiction, it’s a work of realistic fiction.
The governess’s second sighting of Peter Quint, as he
stares in through the window, differs from the first in that it
is slightly more subjective. Her description of the first sighting
focuses exclusively on what Quint looks like and what she sees him
do, but this time she reports being seized by a flash of insight
and certain knowledge that Quint is looking for someone other than
her. This difference is important because the governess’s claims
about the ghosts become increasingly more subjective as the story
goes on. By Chapter VI, she claims to know that Quint was looking
for Miles. We believe the governess because her first vision seems
to be very factual—she observes a man, she doesn’t know he is a
ghost, and she doesn’t know he looks like Quint; therefore, her
vision must be trustworthy. As we read further, however, the governess
claims to know or intuit many things that cannot be proven simply
by the evidence of her senses. The less factual her impressions,
the less certain we are that she is trustworthy. When Mrs. Grose
sees the governess peering in from the spot where Quint was, she
describes the governess as a terrifying and dreadful sight, hinting
that the governess herself may be a source of terror to others rather
than a hero or savior, as the governess would like to think.
The governess’s description for Mrs. Grose of Peter Quint’s
appearance displays a strange mixture of attraction and repulsion.
Even if we feel sure that Quint is a real ghost and not a product
of the governess’s mind, we may still get the sense that the governess’s
perceptions about Quint are not purely insightful and that, to a
certain extent, the governess projects her own desires and fears
onto him. Quint is clearly a foil for the absent master—similarly
attractive, and at one time the master’s proxy at Bly, but emphatically
not a gentleman like the master. We know that the governess fell
in love with the master during their interviews, so we can assume
that the master awakened sexual desires in the governess. However,
the governess has no outlet for those feelings, because the precondition
for winning the master’s approval is to endure his absence and not seek
to communicate with him. She describes Quint as “tall, active, erect”
and “remarkably” handsome, making it clear that she finds him attractive,
but she also perceives him as aggressive and terrifying. We might infer
that her frustrated desire for the master is what prompts her to
see Quint as a sexual substitute, as someone who is attractive but,
unlike the master, available. However, Quint’s sexual availability
is also terrifying, because the social consequences of sex with
a man like him would be so destructive. The governess’s fear of Quint’s
sexuality (or her fear of her own desire for him) seems to manifest
itself as a contempt for his status as a servant, and throughout
the story she dwells on the dangers and evils of his lower-class,
servile, ungentlemanly condition.
