In the governess' second encounter with the ghost James uses triangulated lines of sight to create confusion and disrupt straightforward narrative. This scene needs a bit more set-up, so please bear with me for a moment. On a rainy day, the governess enters a room to pick up her gloves when she sees someone standing outside of the window looking in. She recognizes this as the same person she had seen earlier. Shocked at the sight, she rushes out of the house and around to the same window to, apparently, try to confront the man but she is unable to find him. Outside the window, she has the urge to position herself where she had seen the man and peers back into the house. As she does so, Mrs. Grose enters the room and sees here exactly where she herself had seen the man moments before.
This scene has always been puzzling to me because of the governess' reaction. There are several things going on. First, she sees the apparition and immediately attributes motives to it that she cannot know. She also admits that she cannot clearly see the face but she is convinced that it is the same person she had seen on top of the house, even though she could not clearly see the face then, either. Her impulse to run outside and then stand where the man stood is unexplained, and then, after this, she wonders why Mrs. Grose should be so startled by a similar image.
James uses the scene to continue to develop the governess' in/credibility. She provides detail with great confidence that the reader may be prepared to accept on an initial reading, but that is really unsupported in the text. For example, she claims: "On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there. He had come for someone else." She also admits that though she is seeing the man just through a pane of glass, his appearance to her is not with "greater distinctness" than her view from the garden when he was on the roof. In the following chapter in conversation with Mrs. Grose, the governess calls the apparition a "horror" and expresses her belief that the children are in danger. Again, these assertions that she makes are not supported by what actually happens in the text. James uses dense, overwrought language to mask what is actually happening. The governess seems to be purposefully abstracting her descriptions, so much so that it can take several readings through a passage to make sense of what she is trying to express. I believe that the difficulty of the text is a deliberate choice that James makes to develop ambiguity in what is actually going on.
The third encounter that the governess has with the ghost is, again outside in the garden near a pond. This time, though, the little girl Flora is with her. James plays the similar trick of providing some narrative exposition from the governess' perspective, but he turns on his technique. Instead of just relying on the reader's interpretation, James produces a second witness-of-a-sort. James suggests, via the governess, that Flora also saw the ghost. However, we have only the governess' word on this as we never hear directly from Flora.
The governess describes a few more encounters with the ghost that are similar to those already described. In the meantime, the governess learns the story of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, two servants who were involved with each other and had died premature deaths. She becomes convinced that the ghosts that she has seen are these two and that they have been interacting with the children Miles and Flora. Further, she believes that the children are lying to her about their interactions.
This all culminates in the final scene. The governess has sent away Mrs. Grose and Flora. She is alone in the house with Miles when she has her final encounter with Quint. The ending passages are filled with the same sort of confusing text as the rest of the novella. The governess uses elaborate description to create distance between action and narration. For example, "I seized, stupefied, his supposition--some sequel to what we had done to Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still than that." Every action is qualified and described ornately.
The governess believes that she sees either Miss Jessel or Quint outside of the window and clutches Miles to her chest. Here is the final paragraph:
"But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day. With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall. I caught him, yes, I held him--it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little hear, dispossessed, had stopped."
The governess wants the reader to believe that she saw either Quint of Miss Jessel outside of the window, there is some disagreement in the text which it is. She intimates that Miles also sees the apparition. This struggle, is meant to be her wresting Miles from the ghost's grasp, but he dies in her arms. It is possible that he has died of fright, that he has been taken by the ghost, of that he has been smothered by the governess in her own panic. The text leaves open the question of what actually happens. Are there ghosts or does the governess just imagine them? We don't know. Do others actually see the ghosts or does the governess merely believe that others see them and are hiding this knowledge from her? Again, we don't know.
The point of the story is not to solve the story but to create these moments of confusion. The reader is confronted with deciding what can and cannot be known in the narrative. This, like much of James' other work, points back to reliability and individual perception. Whatever happens, the governess has her perceptions of what is going on and we are only able to base our judgments of the events on this version. The construct of her narrative will always mediate our perception of those events.
To extrapolate from this: even if it is possible to have an objective view of events (something I do not believe is possible), the retelling, or narrativizing, of these events will always be colored by individual perception. The reader cannot know what happens in the story and this is not just because the governess may or may not be telling the truth. My own interpretation of the story is that the governess purposefully dissembles and describes events in a roundabout way for some reason of her own. I don't believe hat there is enough in the text even to determine why she may be doing this. I also believe that James does this purposefully be focalizing the narrative through the governess and by creating levels of mediation from the action. He abstracts events from narrative through the frame and through the governess' own language. This is an exercise to demonstrate the fundamental unknowability that is at the center of the story.
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