Turn Of The Screw The Governess Insane
The novel, Turn of the Screw, by Henry James takes place in England and is told from the point of view of the Governess, whose sanity is questionable. The Governess is insane because throughout the novel, she is the only one who sees the ghosts, she is in love with the master, and she allows her desire to protect the children to drive her to insanity.
First, the Governess is insane because she is the only character in the novel to ever have seen the ghosts. Early in the novel, the Governess claims she sees the ghost of Peter Quint, and immediately tells Mrs. Grose. At first, Mrs. Grose goes along with the idea of ghost sightings, but soon after, she says that “she herself has seen nothing, not the shadow of a shadow, and nobody in the house
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In the preface of the novel, a man named Douglas sets the stage for the rest of the novel, explaining the relationship between the Governess and the master. When talking about the Governess, he says that “she was in love” (James 3). Love very often drives people to act rashly or do things they would not otherwise do. In the case of the Governess, her love for the master and her desire to impress him cause her to find reasons to talk to him about the well-being of the children. She begins to hallucinate and tell tales of dangerous phantoms so that she can speak to the master and possibly win his affection, thus making her insane. Her love for the master does not make her insane, but the way she acts upon that love does. In describing the Governess’s first meeting with the master, Douglas says that “he struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid, but what took her most of all and gave her the courage she afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as a favor” (James 4). This shows that the Governess is at once infatuated with the master. She thinks he is perfect and describes him as angelic, which proves she is in fact in love with him. Her obsession with his beauty stop her from reasoning rationally where he is concerned, and this translates to her behavior around Miles and Flora, who are his niece and nephew. Because her love for the master affects her behavior, the Governess can be deemed insane. The Governess is in love with the master of the house, and although he is not an important character in the novel, the affect he has on the Governess drives her to
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