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ENGL2055 American Gothic: Haunted Homes

March 1, 2005: The absence of the gentleman
Class, gender and authority in The Turn of the Screw

I. The Turn of the Screw as a representation of 19th-century social realities

II. Quint as the master's uncanny double

III. The governess and the repression of sexual desire

IV. The governess and the uncertainty of authority

Further Reading

Updated: Feb. 23, 2005

by Otto Heim

I. The Turn of the Screw as a representation of 19th-century social realities

Last week we looked at Gothic realism in terms of a narrative discourse that establishes
a situation of familiarity and intimacy for the reader in order to generate uncanny effects
as the familiar becomes ghostly (blurring the difference between the living and the dead)
and the intimate becomes treacherous. This week I want to look at realism in terms of
how The Turn of the Screw represents, and reflects on, social realities of the nineteenth
century. In particular, I want to discuss how James's novel reflects on questions of class
and gender.

We can undertake such a reading of the novel, even though, as we saw last week, the
text seems designed to be elusive about the "realities" it refers to, and even though
James in some of his correspondence claimed that The Turn of the Screw was a “study
of nothing at all” and that he “blush[ed] to see real substance read into [his
inventions]” (see the letters in the Norton Edition, 114 & 115). Keeping this in mind, we
might indeed ask about the significance of absence or elusiveness in James's
representation of social relations.

One way of doing this is to raise the question of the absence of the master, the
gentleman in Harley Street, Miles's and Flora's uncle, and how it affects the story. Its
most obvious effect is that it places the governess center stage. It is the uncle's refusal
to be present that creates the position that the governess has to fill. The foregrounding
of the governess in the text is the reverse side of the absence of the master from the
scene. We can therefore use the governess's position as a focal point to examine the
social relations which are exposed as the master exercises his unquestioned privilege to
be absent. By looking at her in this way, we are less interested in the representation of
the governess as an individual character than in her function as a figure bringing into
focus larger social relations and issues.

The issues that we will explore a little here concern class relations, gender relations, and
relations of authority; and as we look at them we will also consider the uncanny effects
that the master's absence seems to give rise to. The three issues that I want to focus on
can be summarized like this:

1) The absence of the gentleman implies the presence, or the threat, of his other, he

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who is not a gentleman, i.e. it gives rise to anxiety about class boundaries.

2) The absence of the gentleman signifies the denial or unreachablility of an object of

desire, i.e. it may imply repression and the return of the repressed in threatening or
frightening form.

3) The absence of the gentleman puts the woman in charge, in a position of authority,
raising the question of the nature of authority.

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II. Quint as the master's uncanny double

"But if he isn't a gentleman –"

"What is he? He’s a horror.” (22)

What is a gentleman? In the nineteenth century, "gentleman" denoted a position of

social authority both in class and gender terms. The gentleman occupies a privleged
socio-economic position, a position that he has inherited rather than achieved. He can
afford an easy life style, having several servants at his command. As a bachelor he is an
object of desire for marriageable ladies; as a husband he is the master of his wife. The
governess, as Douglas tells us at the beginning of the story, pictures the gentleman in
Harley Street thus:

"He was handsome and bold and pleasant, off-hand and gay and kind. He
struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid... She figured him as rich, but
as fearfully extravagant – saw him all in a glow of high fashion, of good
looks, of expensive habits, of charming ways with women" (4)

Quint, by contrast, she immediately recognizes as "never ... a gentleman" (23). So what
are the distinguishing features of the non-gentleman?

Quint "has no hat. ... He has red hair, very red, close-curling, and a pale
face, long in shape, with straight good features and little rather queer
whiskers that are as red as his hair. His eyebrows are somehow darker...
His eyes are sharp, strange... His mouth's wide, and his lips are thin,
except for his little whiskers he's quite clean-shaven. He gives me a sort of
sense of looking like an actor" (23)

What gives away the 'non-gentleman' in this picture?

Why does the governess consider him a horror even before she "knows"
that he is a ghost?

What threat or threats does Quint's apparition represent?

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III. The governess and the repression of sexual desire

Like the word "gentleman" the term "governess" in the nineteenth century referred to a
specific social position, but whereas the gentleman's position implied security, the
governess's position implied precariousness. By birth and upbringing, she was a lady,
belonging to the same class as the gentleman. As such she depended on the security of
her father's financial means to support her while she was unmarried and to assist her in

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getting married by providing her with an attractive dowry. If for some reason, her father's
finances were insufficient and she failed to find a husband, she could no longer afford
the life of a leisured lady and had to find a way to support herself. Along with teaching in
a school the occupation of a governess was virtually the only respectable line of work
open to a lady in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and even this inevitably
implied a sliding class position. The governess's social position was thus accutely
ambiguous: her qualification for teaching the children of a well-to-do middle-class family
depended on her own upbringing as a lady, but her employment brought her into
association with the domestics who were drawn from lower socio-economic classes. As
Millicent Bell points out:

"She had to be a lady to carry out her role but was surely not ladylike in
working for her living and no social equal of leisured ladies. Paid at best no
more than a housekeeper or butler, she was often also resented by the
servants who worked beside her for holding herself above them" (94).

This in-between position on the borderline between social classes tended to make the
governess's situation a very lonely one, fraught with difficulties that she had to negotiate.
Her role of inculcating in the children proper moral values and conduct demanded that
she showed exemplary behavior and avoided too close an intimacy with the other
domestics in the household. Acting as a surrogate mother, her relationship to the
children had to be at once intimate and to acknowledge he pupils' social superiority as
members of her employer's family. Unmarried and demonstrating motherly and ladylike
virtues, she also had to guard her moral integrity and to remain wary not to make herself
openly desirable to any male member of her employer's family and social circle.

According to Millicent Bell, the difficulties of the governess's position were widely
acknowledged in Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century. This showed
itself in governesses' efforts to form something like a professional and class
consciousness through the establishment of self-help associations like the Governesses'
Benevolent Insititution in 1841 (Bell 92), as well as in the concern with the mental health
of governesses and the high percentage of governesses among the inmates of mental
hospitals (95). it also showed itself in the 1830s and 1840s in the emergence of a
subgenre of fiction that Bell calls the "governess novel" (91). Setting the governess's
experience at Bly in the 1840s, Henry James seems to show his familiarity with these
concerns and to evoke the governess novel as one framework for an interpretation of his
story.

The governess in The Turn of the Screw herself alludes to this framework when she
wonders whether there is "an insane, an unmentionable relative kept in unsuspected
confinement" (17) at Bly, drawing a parallel between her own situation and that of the
heroine in Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre (1847). The fictional Jane's eventual
happy marriage to her former employer, Rochester, thus seems to nourish the
governess's own dream of gaining her employer's love, a dream which, as Douglas tells
us right at the beginning, was justified, for "she'd have been worthy of any whatever" (2).
Douglas also tells us that the dream was not to be fulfilled, since the governess only saw
her employer twice, but when she arrives at Bly she doesn't know this and it is her
dream that makes her see the house at first as "a castle of romance" (9).

In order to prove herself worthy, however, the governess has to obey the master's
injunction never to contact him and to repress her own sexual desire for him. From this
point of view, as Millicent Bell also observes (95), Edmund Wilson's suggestion that the
ghosts are the products of the governess's imagination laboring under the force of
repression seems justified insofar as it recognizes her as a representation of a social
type.

What additional touches does this interpretation alert us to in the portrait of

Quint as the governess draws it?

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How does Miss Jessel fit into this interpretation as a manifestation of the
governess's repressed desire?

Apart from the two ghostly apparitions, can you find any other signs of
repressed sexuality in the governess's experience at Bly?

Ultimately, while there is no open sexuality to be seen in the novel, it seems as if the
frustration of the conventional marriage plot (the governess's Jane Eyre fantasy) gives
rise to a proliferation of imagined sexual transgressions. This proliferation seems itself
inseparable from the governess's struggle to assume the authority that has been vested
in her by the master.

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IV. The governess and the uncertainty of authority

The absence of the master after all puts the governess in charge, forcing her to assume
an authority that is not "naturally" hers. In a sense, The Turn of the Screw is the story of
the governess's struggle to possess what she is made to assume.

How do you define authority? What is it based on? How is it acquired?

Considering the uncle's refusal to be informed or consulted, we might ask ourselves

whether with this instruction the master gives up his (position of) authority or indeed
exercises it. In what ways could his withdrawal be seen as a particular way of exercising
his authority? Can he be said to delegate his authority if he doesn't want to receive any
reports? Can authority be based on a lack of knowledge?

The master gives the governess authority based on an assumption — the assumption
that the governess will effectively manage Bly even without his supervision. Could he be
trying to secure this assumption by allowing the governess to form an attachment to him
during their interviews?

In a different way, the governess's authority, as it is transmitted to her by the master, is

also based on assumptions: first in that she must assume a vacant position of authority,
and then increasingly in that she has to assume more and more knowledge in order to
secure her authority. By detailing her struggle to possess what she is made to assume,
James's novel seems to explore what it means to assume authority and to question the
possibility of actually possessing it.

The governess has to struggle to assume her authority because, unlike the master, she
cannot take it for granted. In part this is due to the slipperiness of the social situation of
her position as governess, which, as we have seen, puts her in charge of children who
are her superiors in terms of class and, in the case of Miles, gender. More importantly,
however, she also has to struggle because her position involves a moral compromise.
As the moral guardian of the children, her authority depends on her own moral integrity
and her exemplary character. At the same time, by assuming her position, she also
acknowledges the master's own preference for a life-style that is morally dubious and
tacitly condones it. In order to protect the children effectively, she must know more about
moral corruption than they do, and at the same time, she must know that Miles at least,
as a young gentleman, will eventually be entitled to overstep the moral boundaries that
she must respect.

Her authority thus depends on a certain knowingness (having knowledge that cannot or
must not be divulged or imparted), mostly revolving around matters of sexuality. And her
struggle consists in incorporating this knowingness into a morally consistent position. To

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some extent this is a problem of tact: the governess has to pretend to know less than
she does. But the reverse side of this is that she must assume more than she knows for
certain. In order to protect and guide the children, she must make sure that she is
always ahead of them; she must always look for further significance in what she knows
or simply observes and try to assimilate it into a morally unambiguous and
unquestionable position. Early on in the story she already says to Mrs. Grose:

The more I go over it the more I see in it, and the more I see in it the more I
fear. I don't know what I don't see, what I don't fear!" (30)

This struggle to retain or to claim her authority leads the governess into a spiral of
assumptions, as she cannot reject any possible significance of what she sees and is
always led to wonder what if?

z What if the master condoned Quint’s behavior?

z What if the children know what Quint and Miss Jessel were up to?
z What if Quint and Miss Jessel continue to exert an influence on the children?
z What if the children themselves are morally corrupted and, in the case of Miles,
exert a bad influence?
z What if what I know to be unnatural is itself part of human nature, “only another
turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue” (77)?
z What if the children, after all, are innocent? (83)

In this spiralling movement of ever-expanding assumptions lurks the danger of madness,

as the governess herself points out early on (27). Nevertheless, she cannot close herself
to this flood of assumptions because only when she has absorbed and sifted through all
the possibilities can she be certain of her authority. Only when she has incorporated all
the possibilities into a morally unambiguous interpretation can she be in possession of
all the facts and justified.

The novel suggests that this is impossible, however. At the end of the story, the
governess reaches a point where she can literally take “No more, no more, no
more” (84). And when she finally feels that she has won her struggle, that she "know[s]
everything" (83), she realizes, in retrospect, that she “was blind with victory” (83).

Such a reading of the governess's predicament can raise a number of questions:

What, for instance, is the significance of Miles's death in this reading? How
does the expression, "his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped", reflect
on the governess's struggle for possession?

Does The Turn of the Screw imply that women are incapable of assuming
authority?
In his preface to the New York edition of the novel, James seems to
anticipate this conclusion and at the same time to reject it: "She has
'authority,' which is a good deal to have given her" (Norton Edition 126).
What then is the significance of the governess's gender in relation to her
authority? In what ways can her predicament be seen as representative of
a more general situation?

How is the governess's struggle to possess what she must assume

reflected at the level of the narrator's authority over the narrative and
duplicated in the frame narrative?
We have already noticed the chain of transmissions in the narrative frame
of the story, in which the living take the place of the dead and responsibility
for a charge that is entrusted to them. We might therefore consider how the

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governess's situation and its outcome reflect on these "authorizations" and

what implications this might have for the position of the reader.

It would be possible and interesting to extend this line of thinking to the question of
James’s own position. The absence of the gentleman or the master could thus also be
interpreted as referring to the absence of James the author from the text. What might be
the implications of the author's dissociation from his story as expressed in the quotations
at the beginning of this page? Could we assume that by placing a woman in the position
of the writer, James is exploring an idea of feminine writing as possibly undermining or
deconstructing a male concept of authority? Such a question might make a comparison
of The Turn of the Screw with "The Yellow Wallpaper" interesting. In this story, written by
Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1890, writing is also associated with male authority and its
assumption by a woman leads to ghostly apparitions and the collapse of the male figure
of authority as well as, it seems, of the woman's sanity.

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Further reading

z Bell, Millicent. "Class, Sex, and the Victorian Governess: James's The Turn of the
Screw." New Essays on Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw. Ed. Vivian R.
Pollak. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 91-119.
z McWhirter, David. "In the 'Other House' of Fiction: Writing, Authority, and
Femininity in The Turn of the Screw." New Essays on Daisy Miller and The Turn
of the Screw. Ed. Vivian R. Pollak. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993. 121-48.
z Owens, E. Suzanne. "The Ghostly Double behind the Wallpaper in Charlotte
Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'." Haunting the House of Fiction:
Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women. Ed. Lynette
Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991. 64-79.
z Robbins, Bruce. "Recognition: Servant in the Ending." The Turn of the Screw:
Authoritative Text, Context, Criticism. Ed. Deborah Esch and Jonathan Warren.
2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1999. 238-40.
z Weisbuch, Robert. "Henry James and the Idea of Evil." The Cambridge
Companion to Henry James. Ed. Jonathan Freedman. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1998. 102-19.

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