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Reading into Henry James
Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Jonathan Flatley
Faced with children whose parents and grandparents have left them orphaned, the governess must deal with a melancholia that is not her own. Not only does she have to respond to the children's experience of loss--an affect eerily absent from their initial cheery presentation--but she also has to substitute for these dead and gone guardians. Emotions are directed at her that do not concern her. This defines a particular type of ghostly scene: when ghosts appear that seem to recognize us but whom we do not recognize. Jacques Derrida has suggested that this is something like a law of spectrality itself: "the spectral someone looks at us, we feel ourselves being looked at by it, outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority ... and asymmetry, according to an absolutely unmasterable disproportion." (30) This ghost is always before us and beyond us in an absolute way: there is no hope of being present to it.
But I see ghosts everywhere.
Henry James to Francis Boott, October 11, 1895 (31)
When the governess arrives at the estate she finds everything indescribably beautiful, marvelous, superlative in every way. It is the reaction of a poor girl who has all of a sudden accomplished a great feat of class mobility. She encounters, for example, mirrors "in which, for the first time, I could see myself from head to foot" (7). The governess is bowled over at every turn. She describes Flora, the first child she meets, as "the most beautiful child I had ever seen" (7). Miles, who returns--because sent, she soon learns--from school a few pages later, is "incredibly beautiful--everything but a sort of passion of tenderness for him was swept away by his presence" (13).
Surrounded and charmed by what she perceives to be all this great beauty and a new but fragile sense of self, the governess likes to imagine, from time to time, that the estate is hers: "1 liked it best of all when, as the light faded--or rather, I should say as the day lingered and the last calls of the birds sounded, in a flushed sky from the old trees--I could take a turn into the grounds and enjoy, almost with a sense of property that amused and flattered me, the beauty and dignity of the place" (15). She waxes poetic about the natural beauty of her setting and the sense of property she allows herself to enjoy, a sense that walking the grounds "amused and flattered" her. The class subject that is precluded agency in this class scene, even as it is absolutely necessary for its function, returns in the person of the governess. In a kind of perversion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, she seems to have reversed class roles with the unusual authority she has been granted. But she is alone, without class allies. Moreover, although she has been put in the position of the male proprietor, guarantor of the transference of authority to the son, Miles, she lacks the social agency to manage this transfer, not only because she is a woman but also because she has had no opportunity to learn the structure of feeling of this class position and situation.
