Reading into Henry James

This inability to fill the role that her structural position requires leaves the governess feeling a bit like a ghost--not fully there. She desperately wants to feel as if she is being recognized for doing a good job, but she cannot have that feeling without its being acknowledged: she wishes her accomplishments would "more publicly appear": "It was a pleasure to reflect ... that by my discretion, my quiet good sense and general high propriety, I was giving pleasure--if he ever thought of it!--to the person to whose pressure I had yielded.... I dare say I fancied myself in short a remarkable young woman and took pleasure in the faith that this would more publicly appear" (15). Because she feels unrecognized and because her "handsome and bold and pleasant, offhand and gay and kind" bachelor is absent, she must guess at the pleasure that he could be having if he were to see her. Like James, she suffers for her lack of a public. She has no one to read her. "It was plump, one afternoon, in the middle of my very hour: the children were tucked away and I had come out for my stroll. One of the thoughts that, as I don't in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone" (15). Her articulation of her desire here is precise and telling in its ambiguous undecidability: it "would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone." In one reading of the phrase, the governess would be charmed as if she were reading: "If I were to meet someone, it would charm me in the same way that a charming story charms me." But we could with equal legitimacy understand the governess as imagining herself not reading the story but in the story, being read, being charming: meeting someone would be the kind of a (charming) thing that happens in a charming story. She wants to be in a story and reader of the story, reading and being read at once. This is the transitivity that is for James the essence of the "sense of communication." At this moment, a ghost appears.

   Someone would appear there at the turn of the path and would stand
   before me and smile and approve. I didn't ask more than that--I
   only asked that he should know; and the only way to be sure that he
   knew would be to see it, and the kind of light of it, in his
   handsome face. That was exactly present to me--by which I mean the
   face was--when ... what arrested me on the spot--and with a shock
   much greater than any vision had allowed for--was the sense that my
   imagination had, in a flash, turned real. He did stand there!
   (15-16)

Fully consumed by her prosopopoetic reverie, the governess imagines the face of the other who would see, smile, and approve. She wants an other who would allow her to make sense of her surroundings, the face behind the uncertain text that would allow her to more confidently read it. It is that mutual reflexive substitution of the readerly situation that she wants. And as James conjured an audience for himself that would turn real, or like Fullerton, who would erect an imagined James behind his letters in order to fantasize about what dirty things he might desire, the governess too sees a man seeing her.