The Turn of the Screw
Most of them [the critics] argue that the governess, in James tale, is neurotic or insane and sees no apparitions: she merely records her own hallucinations and thier damaging effect on two innocent children (Spilka 245). Like the children, she lives in a culture where sexual "horrors" are invested with religious dread, and the term "horror" connects natural with infernal realms (Spilka 248). But in doing so she enables James to establish sometimes more important: the inevitable failure of Victorian domestic sainthood in coping with erotic horror (Spilka 249). The governess was raised in a Victorian society, which were believed by many critics to be her problem. A Victorian child lived a very sheltered life away from all sexual encounters, which would soon catch up with them later in life. Henry James uses conflict, character, and symbolism to express repression and romanticism in a Victorian society in "The Turn of the Screw."Most of the governess' in the Victorian ages were said to live the loneliest lives in this time and could lead them into insanity. The life of a governess was to take care of the children and that was all, there is no room for friends or a sexual companion. The situation
The first ghost she saw was a man in the tower that nobody else saw and the second time she saw him was through the window, which nobody else saw. The Victorian background explains a lot of the governess' problems because of the way they raise their children. She unconsciously creates the ghosts and their persecution of the children to deal with her frustration (Heller 11). If governess' were notoriously lonely, absolute loneliness is what this governess suffers at Bly where no members of the children's family is ever to be met and no company comes (Bell 103). This repression she has put upon herself will make her work so hard to impress him and create fantasies of which will build up to where she can start to hallucinate over him. The affects of this type of confinement towards sex can only make it worse because God gave us the ability to have sexual feelings and keeping kids from that will make them very interested when they are confronted with those feelings. of governess' is one of misery and bad health, even where every kindness is meant to be shown (Bell 95). The only thing that can describe these odd ghosts that only the governess sees is that she is neurotic. It shows that right from the start she is going to have a problem because she was in love and the job of a governess was proven to be one of the loneliest jobs there is. She waits for the uncles return even though he may not even come back. That right there says that the new governess has never experienced love before because no one would fall in love with someone that they just met, not even knowing that they see each other again, and tells her that he does not want her to bother him. This young lady that is for the first time leaving her sheltered home life to be a governess, finds herself losing all her sexual inhibitions that she was kept from. The Victorian adults did not want their kids exposed to sex and they were extremely strict about it. The governess at Bly has stored up so much sexual repression from her childhood that she goes fanatic after meeting one guy that asks her to be the governess of his niece and nephew. After she fell in love with her handsome employer, she nursed her feelings with fantasies and much of her later behavior is motivated by her desire to impress him (Slaughter 212).
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