Virtue or Villainy? Mrs. Grose in “The Turn of the Screw” and The Haunting of Bly Manor

Henry James’ novella, “The Turn of the Screw” (1898), begins with a description of a coterie gathered around a fire on Christmas Eve as they listen to a ghost story told by Griffin, a member of their party. The unnamed first-person narrator tells the reader that “The story had held us […] sufficiently breathless”;1 the guests are equal parts thrilled and appalled by the “gruesome” tale of a child who has had the unfortunate fate of being visited by a ghost. Yet Griffin’s story is but a prelude to the “quite too horrible” tale delivered by Douglas and which serves as the main narrative of the novella (116). Before Douglas can triumph against his would-be competitors in this arena of entertainment, he must first get the crowd on his side. First, Douglas sells the shock value and singularity of his narrative to his audience: “It’s beyond everything. Nothing at all that I know touches it [… for] dreadfulness” and “for general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain” (116). He also makes use of his audience’s need for immediate gratification by delaying the telling of his tale until four nights later. Rather indelicately, Douglas hints at an unrequited romance between the governess and the master of Bly, though “not in any literal vulgar way” (118). And so, Douglas’ strategies of deferral, magnification and foreshadowing all work to create a highly anticipated story among his patient and eager audience: the “hushed little circle […] compact and select […] round the hearth” was “subject to a common thrill” (119).

I have started this chapter with the Prologue of “The Turn of the Screw” because its atmospherics, interpersonal dynamics and temporality capture my experiences listening to Bruce’s lectures and seminars. No matter whether you were listening to Bruce in a lecture theatre or in his office, regardless of whether he was teaching in front of hundreds of students or just a select few, the effect was the same: you felt as if the story was being told only to you and for you: “It was to me in particular that he appealed to propound this” (116). Intensity, immediacy and sociability characterised Bruce’s teaching and are features that speak to his generosity as an educator. But I have also started with the Prologue because it highlights one of the most enduring qualities of Bruce’s teaching – that is, its irresistible performativity. Putting aside the considerable pedagogical value of Bruce’s teaching for a moment, I will always remember fondly how exciting Bruce’s lectures and seminars were: like the narrator who pressures Douglas to retrieve the governess’ manuscript post-haste and agree to an “early hearing” (116), it was difficult for me to wait patiently for Bruce’s lecture or seminars to begin or continue into another week, as much as “it was just his scruples that charmed me” (116).

There is one final reason why “The Turn of the Screw” is the principal focus of this chapter. When I first learned about the festschrift for Bruce, his lecture on “The Turn of the Screw”, delivered as part of the first-year undergraduate course, Reading English Texts (2014),2 immediately sprang to mind. For within this lecture, Bruce’s talent for offering contrary and unorthodox readings of canonical literature was on full display. Thomas M. Cranfill and Robert L. Clark, Jr. describe how “The Turn of the Screw” is “a source of endless inspiration and provocation”3 among critics and artists alike. Bruce’s lecture has taken as its starting point two significant and competing ways of viewing Mrs. Grose that were evident during the peak of criticism on “The Turn of the Screw”:4 either as an unintelligent, older and unattractive widow or as a villain who is intensely resentful of the governess for being given “supreme authority” at Bly (121). The former interpretation of Mrs. Grose is typified in Colm Toíbín’s sniping remark that she is “deeply stupid”,5 whereas the latter has been pushed to absurdity in Eric Solomon’s mock satirical essay, “The Return of the Screw”. However, Bruce’s lecture, in keeping with his “general fondness for underdogs”6 in literature and culture, shows that Mrs. Grose is far from being slow-witted or fiendish; in fact, she is highly skilled at interpreting and adjudging the governess’ frenzied testimony. In this respect, Bruce’s sympathetic reading of Mrs. Grose suggests continuity with Arthur Boardman’s appraisal of this character. For Boardman, the answer to whether the ghosts are real or confected by the governess’ imagination is definitively settled through “analysing the function in the work of Mrs. Grose”.7 Importantly, Boardman elevates Mrs. Grose to the position of being a “first reader of the governess’ story” even though she is “illiterate”.8 That Boardman believes readers should through Mrs. Grose’s judgement accept the governess’ account as reasonable and true demonstrates admirable qualities of this character that have often been denied to her by other critics: she is reliable and honest, a “giver of hints” to the governess that things are awry at Bly, and most importantly, an incisive “first reader” of the governess whose judgement must be accepted because its logic stems from scepticism that has put the governess’ account through a series of rhetorical twists and turns.9

This chapter will begin with an overview of the two interpretations that have informed Bruce’s alternative reading of Mrs. Grose. This will be followed by a close analysis of Mrs. Grose’s interactions with the governess as a means of demonstrating her facility to dissect, elucidate and parse the often-confused recollections of the governess. Finally, I will discuss The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), a miniseries adaptation of “The Turn of the Screw” created by Mike Flanagan, which offers a fresh approach towards Mrs. Grose as compared to standard cinematic portrayals of her character.

“A Magnificent Monument to the Blessing of a Want of Imagination”

A key issue at stake in “The Turn of the Screw” is the question of what – or whom – is the subject of interpretation and interpretability. Bruce argues that Miles and Flora are the “text” that the governess must interpret and “from the outset she fears she misses, or doesn’t catch, something in [them]” (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–5). For Bruce and following on from Boardman, Mrs. Grose’s role as the “first” reader of the governess’ account10 is an essential rhetorical feature of the novella that enables the young woman to perform the “interpretive labour” of psychologically “turning” over what she sees and hears at Bly (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–5). Acting as the governess’ only confidante during the time in which she held her post, Mrs. Grose routinely subjects the governess to persistent, yet nonetheless equanimous, interrogation. This leads Bruce to label the pair as “one joint investigative team”, where Mrs. Grose’s main contribution is to act as a “countervailing power” to the governess by moderating the latter’s conspiratorial inclination to view the children as willing accomplices in their corruption by the ghosts (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–9). By midway through the narrative, the governess is convinced that the preternatural goodness and beauty of Miles and Flora are but “a policy and a fraud!”, and moreover that the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are intent on manipulating the children: “They want to get to them […] For the love of all the evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put into them. And to ply them with that evil still, […] is what brings the others back” (181). However, Mrs. Grose withholds her judgement until after she becomes an ear-witness to Flora’s “appalling language” and concludes that Miles has been dismissed from school for stealing letters: “It strikes me that by this time your eyes are open even wider than mine” (221, 222).

Bruce’s reading of Mrs. Grose runs contrary to common historical interpretations of this character as being a credulous and unintelligent woman.11 Mrs. Grose’s illiteracy is treated as a sign of her general lack of intelligence, even though common sense understands that books and schooling do not have a monopoly on the cultivation of human intelligence. N. Bryllion Fagin, for one, calls her “a simple [and…] undiscerning person”;12 this is echoed by Dennis Tredy in his appraisal of the housekeeper as “simple-minded”.13 In keeping with these less-than-sterling descriptions of her character, Robert B. Heilman calls Mrs. Grose “slow-witted”,14 while “highly unimaginative” springs forth from E.C. Curtsinger.15

On the other hand, Eric Solomon, C. Knight Aldrich and Helen Killoran have departed from this reading by regarding Mrs. Grose as the novella’s primary antagonist.16 Calling her one of the “most clever and desperate of Victorian villainesses”, Solomon believes that Mrs. Grose is responsible for murdering Quint due to her deep possessiveness over Flora.17 Solomon also proposes that Mrs. Grose displays a hidden cunning in exploiting the governess’ willingness to view her as intellectually and socially inferior; once gaining the governess’ trust, she can “cleverly [work…] on her victim’s imagination” and drive her insane by telling her that the ghosts she has apparently seen are Quint and Miss Jessel.18 Aldrich holds a similar interpretation of Mrs. Grose, believing that the housekeeper “hates the governess” and seeks to “destroy her”.19 To lend support to their argument, Aldrich directs the reader’s attention to three main points: first, that Mrs. Grose discourages the governess from speaking to Miles or anyone else within the household to provide visual corroboration of Quint; second, that Mrs. Grose is the only person to hear Flora utter shocking language (“From that child – horrors! […] On my honour, Miss, she says things –!” [James, “Turn”, Chapter 21, 220]); and third, that Mrs. Grose is in fact Miles and Flora’s biological mother.20 For Aldrich, Mrs. Grose’s resentment towards the governess is attributed to the latter being a potential maternal obstacle to the children’s affections.21 Meanwhile, Killoran’s reading of “The Turn of the Screw” sees the governess and Mrs. Grose as being engaged in a “rivalry […] for control of the children”.22 Miss Jessel is consequently regarded as a “psychological projection of the competition between herself and Mrs. Grose to ‘get hold of’ Flora”.23

With respect to these interpretations of Mrs. Grose, there are moments in the governess’ recollections of the housekeeper that lend support to an interpretation of her character as being impressionable and naive. The governess’ first meeting with Mrs. Grose catches her off-guard due to the latter’s submissive welcome; the housekeeper is said to have dropped the governess “as decent a curtsy as if I had been the mistress or a distinguished visitor” (123). Furthermore, the governess’ private narration of Mrs. Grose suggests that she regards the housekeeper as a valuable ally, though never an equal, due to her lesser occupational status within the household and level of education.24 According to the governess, Mrs. Grose was a “stout simple plain clean wholesome woman” prone to rash emotion (“with one of the quick turns of simple folk, she suddenly flamed up” [124, 126]) and parochial language (“‘Laws!’ said my friend under her breath. The exclamation was homely” [181–2]). Yet it is clear that critics, as well as the governess, do Mrs. Grose a “disservice” to name her virtue as “stupidity” (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–9). According to Bruce, Mrs. Grose’s main virtue is in fact “an amalgam of trust, charity, [and] hope” that is most apparent in her willingness to listen to the governess’ allegations even as they strain credulity (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–9). Moreover, Mrs. Grose’s urge to remain loyal to the governess even when her eyewitness account differs from her companion’s is apparent in two crucial moments. In Chapter 20, neither Mrs. Grose nor Flora allegedly sees the ghost of Miss Jessel at the lake; the governess notes that Mrs. Grose looked at her with a “sense, touching to me even then, that she would have backed me up if she had been able” (214). After Flora relocates to Mrs. Grose’s bedroom, Mrs. Grose reports back to the governess that she now “believe[s]” the children are under the corrupting influence of Quint and Miss Jessel due to the child’s “appalling language”, language which she had previously heard while the other servants were still alive (221).

As much as Mrs. Grose can be said to be the governess’ faithful and compassionate companion, it is also necessary to highlight how undue attention on her emotional generosity causes another kind of injury to her character. Bruce has argued that the general tendency to view the governess as a psychologically disturbed individual whose sanity and reliability must be questioned is evidence of a “critical narcissism” to disbelieve a narrator or writer solely because of their gender (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–12). For Bruce, this “ad hominem fallacy” undergirds the more specific interpretive problem in “The Turn of the Screw” of whether the governess has authority over her own narrative, that is, whether she has in fact seen the ghosts of Quint and Jessel and that their intentions for the children are nefarious (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–14). To my mind, there has been some critical tendency to view Mrs. Grose as an unthinking “tag along” to the governess,25 yet such accounts fail to recognise how the housekeeper displays a range of interpretive skills that highlight an abundance of scepticism and restraint. Thus, like James W. Gargano, I view Mrs. Grose’s lack of imagination as being the character’s main virtue; as she is “incapable of seeing visions”, the reader can depend on her to provide “unvarnished fact” rather than delusion.26 Indeed, Mrs. Grose’s hesitation to accept the governess’ “eager” “theory of evil” is what leads C.B. Ives to call her “aggravatingly sane and unimaginative”.27 Moments in which the governess discloses her alleged encounters with the ghosts demonstrate that Mrs. Grose’s absence of imagination is a crucial counterweight to her companion’s propensity to locate answers to material phenomena in the realm of the paranormal. Take, for instance, the governess’ conversation with Mrs. Grose in Chapter 5 after her second encounter with Quint. Prior to this, the governess believes she has seen Quint on the tower and once again through the window of the dining room. The latter sighting leads the governess to formulate her theory that “it was not for me he [Quint] had come. He had come for someone else” (142). After an eerie moment of doubling wherein the governess assumes Quint’s position on the lawn and Mrs. Grose her own in the dining room, the governess confesses that she has been visited by “an extraordinary man” on two occasions (144). The governess’ and Mrs. Grose’s conversation reveals the former’s psychological propensity to grasp at conclusions drawn from limited eyewitness testimony. Mrs. Grose’s questioning involves a careful dissection of what the governess has seen; through its focus on ascertaining concrete facts about Quint and the scene in which the supposed “crime” has taken place, Mrs. Grose aids in proving the veracity of the governess’ account.

Mrs. Grose’s “direct examination” of the governess involves a range of techniques, including questions that are open-ended; mirroring the governess’ language for the purposes of clarification; and seeking to assemble a coherent timeline and visual identification of Quint. For example, Mrs. Grose asks the governess whether she has seen Quint before (144) and whether she believes there was any purpose or motivation behind his appearances: “What was he doing on the tower?” (145). Repetition of the governess’ words is another technique employed by Mrs. Grose so that the former’s recollections remain consistent under increasing scrutiny: “What extraordinary man?” (144). Furthermore, Mrs. Grose employs the use of clarifying and leading questions to extract further information from the governess. She asks whether the governess has seen Quint “nowhere but on the tower” and supposes that the governess is “afraid” of him not only for her own sake, but for the children’s (144, 145). It is also notable that the housekeeper refrains from prematurely disclosing her hypothesis until after the governess has given her “perfectly precise, point-by-point” visual identification of Quint, a description that A.J.A. Waldock points out is of someone whom “she had never seen in her life and never heard of”.28 Although she had a “far-away faint glimmer of consciousness […] acute” (145), Mrs. Grose only accepts the veracity of the governess’ account after she is satisfied that her younger companion has proven beyond all reasonable doubt that the intruder is Quint; in addition to giving a description of Quint’s physical appearance, the governess also remarks on a supposed discrepancy between his social class and sartorial choices (“They’re smart, but not his own” [147]), along with the possibility that he may be adept at deception (“He gives me a sort of sense of looking like an actor” [146]).

Following the appearance of an adult female apparition at the lake, the governess rushes to Mrs. Grose and makes three alarming proposals: the unknown person whom she has seen is the ghost of Miss Jessel; the children are fully aware of her and Quint’s presence; and that Miss Jessel and Quint intend to harm the children. While monitoring Flora, the governess becomes aware that “There was an alien object in view – a figure whose right of presence I instantly and passionately questioned” (154). The governess’ immediate fear of the mysterious figure necessarily intersects with her own rapid ascension to the head of Bly. Indeed, as a young and inexperienced woman whom Douglas calls “a fluttered anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage” (119), the governess’ eagerness to assume her professional duties with the utmost competence means that any unexpected happenstance is registered as an incursion or even worse, as a threat. While the governess’ immediate reaction to seeing the female figure at the lake is to “g[et] hold of” Mrs. Grose and provide “no intelligible account” of the matter, her older companion withholds any judgement until it is possible to construct a logical chain of reasoning out of the governess’ jumbled thoughts (155). Notably, in the first half of Chapter 7, Mrs. Grose returns each of the governess’ accusations with a question, thereby refusing to offer explicit agreement until receiving what she regards as an acceptable level of proof that the figure is indeed Miss Jessel. Until the governess provides a description of Miss Jessel’s “infamous” and “wonderfully handsome” beauty, along with the way in which she gazed at Flora “with a kind of fury of intention” (158), Mrs. Grose’s position is to remain suspicious of the governess’ interpretive leaps. Mrs. Grose’s scepticism is obvious in the abundant number of questions that she asks the governess,29 as well as her use of imperative language to force the governess to engage in a self-examination of her beliefs:

Interestingly, once Mrs. Grose surmises that the figure is Miss Jessel, the one-sidedness of their conversation – with Mrs. Grose assuming the role of “interrogator” and the governess her “suspect” – comes to an end. It is now the governess’ turn to ask Mrs. Grose to let go of her “discreet sensitivity to everyone around her” (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–10) and for the latter to “give [her] the whole thing” (159).30 The governess applies pressure on Mrs. Grose to divulge the scandalous nature of Miss Jessel and Quint’s relationship and the many liberties that the latter took with other members of the household. As Mrs. Grose confesses, “I’ve never seen one like him [Quint]. He did what he wished. […] With them all” (159).

The two examples above demonstrate that Mrs. Grose is far from being a character whose illiteracy renders her a poor “reader” of human psychology. In fact, Mrs. Grose’s illiteracy enables her character’s perceptions to be grounded in the mundane rather than the fantastical. Bruce has noted that “Mrs. Grose’s illiteracy means she hasn’t read [Anne] Radcliffe, [Jane] Austen, or the Brontës” (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–10);31 that Mrs. Grose is not susceptible to the kinds of sentimental Gothic romances of the nineteenth century favoured by the governess means that her interpretive tools are protected from literary suggestibility. Ultimately, like Bruce, I would pose the question, “who is to say” that Mrs. Grose “is not the most acute interpreter” in the narrative, considering that her illiteracy might in fact anchor the character’s thoughts and actions to the material, not suprasensory, world? (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–10)

“It’s Not the First Time I’ve Seen Things That Aren’t There”: Hannah Grose in The Haunting of Bly Manor

I would now like to focus on The Haunting of Bly Manor (hereafter The Haunting) and its portrayal of Mrs. Hannah Grose. Flanagan’s recent miniseries is noted for being less tethered to its source material than earlier cinematic adaptations of “The Turn of the Screw”. As a result, Mrs. Grose’s role in resolving the epistemological uncertainty around the ghosts becomes even more prominent in The Haunting as compared to James’ novella and previous adaptations. Critics such as Toíbín,32 James W. Palmer,33 Dennis Tredy34 and Taeko Kitahara35 have observed that The Innocents (1961) – perhaps the most well-known cinematic adaptation of “The Turn of the Screw” – preserves the original ambiguity of the novella by keeping open the possibility that the ghosts are real and that the governess’ sanity cannot be taken for granted. The appearance of the ghosts onscreen might be interpreted as an inarguable display of (their) verisimilitude. Yet according to Palmer, The Innocents reintroduces ambiguity by questioning the objectivity of what the governess sees and hears; the film exploits the Freudian implications of the novella, and thus the interpretation of the governess as being sexually repressed, through phallic imagery, symbolic clothing and a combination of “subjective” and “objective” points of view and sounds.36

The central ambiguity of “The Turn of the Screw” is almost entirely removed from The Haunting. Unlike its source text, the miniseries does not prolong the viewer’s uncertainty about the reality of the ghosts or the mental stability of the governess – refashioned as au pair Danielle “Dani” Clayton – for very long. By just over halfway through the miniseries (episode 5 of 9), epistemological clarity is achieved on several mysteries introduced in earlier episodes. First, viewers become aware that the ghosts of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are real, and thus that Dani is not hallucinating all of the time. Viewers also come to distinguish between Dani’s “objective” and “subjective” perspectives in terms of the nonhuman figures that intrude into her life: whereas Quint and Miss Jessel are ghosts who are “real” and “seen” by not only Dani but other staff members of Bly Manor, Dani’s unexpected visions of her former fiancé are a mental projection of her guilt for disclosing her homosexuality minutes before his untimely death.37 But perhaps the most important way that The Haunting promotes a “pro-apparitionist” interpretation of itself is in its transformation of Mrs. Grose’s character. Viewers come to the realisation that the ghosts are real because Mrs. Grose’s trajectory within the miniseries involves her shocking recognition that she is in fact one of them. That Dani and other “living” characters including Flora and Miles, Owen the cook, and Jamie the housekeeper all interact with Mrs. Grose is the clearest indication that The Haunting exists in a world where the paranormal inserts itself into everyday life in seamless fashion.

If The Haunting of Bly Manor removes the essential ambiguity of “The Turn of the Screw”, then what does it put in its place? I propose that The Haunting retains its audience’s interest through the way it uses Mrs. Grose to propel an investigation into why the ghosts initially misrecognise themselves as being alive. Moreover, Mrs. Grose’s revelation that she was murdered by Quint through his bodily possession of Miles provides a fascinating take on “The Turn of the Screw” in terms of what Quint and Miss Jessel wish to do with Miles and Flora once they “get to them” (181). While the governess in “The Turn of the Screw” fears that Quint and Miss Jessel wish to corrupt the children so that they “keep up the work of the demons” (181), The Haunting does not adopt a Judeo-Christian framework in which the governess is intent on saving the children’s “souls” from “evil”. In The Haunting, Quint and Miss Jessel’s ability to possess the bodies of Miles and Flora springs from a desperation to escape Bly Manor and the horrifying inevitability that their faces and memories will deteriorate because of the “curse” initiated by Viola Willoughby-Lloyd, the original owner of the estate. Mrs. Grose’s prominence in the episode “The Altar of the Dead”38 introduces the problem that all people who die at Bly Manor are unable to escape its “invented gravity”, even though the question of why will be answered in later episodes of the miniseries (“The Romance of Certain Old Clothes”).

Visually speaking, Mrs. Grose in The Haunting is a far cry from the way this character has been physically portrayed in other television and cinematic adaptations. From The Innocents to more recent adaptations of “The Turn of the Screw” such as Presence of Mind (1999, dir. Aloy), Ghost Story: The Turn of the Screw (2009, dir. Fywell) and The Turning (2020, dir. Sigismondi), the casting of Mrs. Grose has followed the general critical reception of her character as being a middle-aged or senior woman who is by extension past her sexual prime. In his lecture, Bruce humorously rejects Malcolm Pittock’s belief that Mrs. Grose “can act disinterestedly”39 towards the children’s supposed perversion by the ghosts because she is neither sexually attracted towards the master nor the recipient of his affections (or anybody else’s for that matter). “What utter nonsense!” Bruce proclaims, and in defence of Mrs. Grose he states that one must not suppose that “older women think clearly because they’ve passed menopause” (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–9; 10). Film directors inspired by “The Turn of the Screw”, however, have for the most part in their casting drawn a clear biological separation between the governess and Mrs. Grose. Invariably, Mrs. Grose has been portrayed by older female actors whose physique and style of dress set the character up as a matronly counterpart to the governess, even if her lack of sexual attractiveness and drive mean that her thoughts stay clear from being “riven with unsatisfied desire” (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–9). Megs Jenkins (1917–1998), for example, played Mrs. Grose twice, the first time in The Innocents and then in the 1974 television film, The Turn of the Screw.40 Sue Johnston, the actor who played Mrs. Sarah Grose in Ghost Story, was sixty-six years old when this television film was released. Barbara Marten in The Turning holds the title of being the oldest actor so far to play Mrs. Grose onscreen, being seventy-seven years of age at the time The Turning came to theatres, while Lauren Bacall comes a close second for her turn as Mado Remei in Presence of Mind (seventy-five years of age).

Mrs. Hannah Grose in The Haunting bucks this standard casting decision in several ways. Played by T’Nia Miller, a British actor of Jamaican heritage, Mrs. Grose appears as a woman in her mid-thirties who has a budding yet ultimately unfulfilled romantic relationship with Owen, the cook played by Rahul Kohli, a British actor of Indian Hindu heritage. Certainly, Miller and Kohli’s casting reflects changes that Flanagan has made to the context in which The Haunting is set. The miniseries relocates the main narrative of “The Turn of the Screw” to 1987, thus reflecting the racial diversity of the United Kingdom of the late twentieth century as compared to Britain at the fin-de-siècle. Miller’s comparatively youthful portrayal of The Haunting is important since her character is locked in a series of “dream-hops” in which Owen’s projected form facilitates her eventual acknowledgement that she is no longer alive. “The Altar of the Dead” involves two key memories or dream-hops that Mrs. Grose returns to repeatedly. The first is a tender moment shared with Owen at a bonfire, in which he asks her to leave Bly Manor and go to Paris with him. The second is Mrs. Grose’s memory of the first time she meets Owen when he interviews for the position of cook. Gradually, Mrs. Grose becomes aware that she has interviewed Owen several times: “haven’t we already done this?” In subsequent repetitions of this dream-hop, Mrs. Grose and Owen deviate from the regular “script” of interviewer and interviewee; without telling Mrs. Grose explicitly that she is a ghost, Owen insinuates the terrible situation in which she – and other dead occupants of Bly – now find themselves:

Together with the repetition of Mrs. Grose’s memory of the bonfire, which has an outcome she is incapable of changing (Owen will not hear her when she finally agrees to leave with him for Paris), the dreaded weight of Owen’s words forces Mrs. Grose to accept her shocking fate: that she is dead, was murdered by Miles/Quint, and that her body is at the bottom of a well. Moreover, “The Altar of the Dead” also begins the work of explaining the nature of Mrs. Grose’s and Quint’s mutual antipathy and how the latter came to die at Bly Manor. In “The Turn of the Screw”, Mrs. Grose has a “dread of Quint when he was alive, a dread that lingers strongly in her memory”.41 Boardman refers to the fact that Mrs. Grose calls Quint “clever” and “deep”, and that he took enormous liberties with everyone at Bly, including the master.42 “The fellow was a hound,” Mrs. Grose declares unabashedly (159). In “The Altar of the Dead”, Mrs. Grose dream-hops to a memory in which she confronts Quint as he is stealing an heirloom owned by Flora and Miles’ deceased mother, Charlotte Wingrave. Quint disabuses Mrs. Grose of her belief that the Wingraves are her family rather than her employers. “It’s a mistake,” he says, for Mrs. Grose to think that Bly Manor is her home. In a statement reminiscent of Douglas’ comment to the unnamed narrator that Mrs. Grose was “head of the little establishment – but belowstairs only” (120), Quint reminds Mrs. Grose in The Haunting that “There’s them, and then there’s us […]. We’re ‘the help’.” Unruffled, Mrs. Grose demands that Quint leave the necklace in its rightful place, only for him to return later in the night to steal it. As Quint prepares to leave the house, Mrs. Grose, Flora and Miles witness the spectral incarnation of Viola Willoughby-Lloyd kill him and drag his body to the lake. As both an eyewitness to Quint’s death and a ghost herself, Mrs. Grose drives the narrative of The Haunting towards resolving the complex mythology surrounding Bly Manor. Indeed, the reason why Mrs. Grose dream-hops is because memories are “a lie preferred to the truth [that she was dead] instead” (“The Romance of Certain Old Clothes”). Furthermore, in “The Altar of the Dead”, viewers come to share Mrs. Grose’s deep distrust of Quint, especially in terms of his influence over Miles. Indeed, only moments after he is murdered by Viola, Quint unexpectedly learns how to occupy Miles’ body. This revelation will lead to his plan with Miss Jessel to possess Miles’ and Flora’s bodies respectively so that they may be able to leave Bly Manor forever.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have taken Bruce’s lecture on “The Turn of the Screw” as inspiration for a recuperative reading of Mrs. Grose in both James’ novella and The Haunting of Bly Manor. Bruce’s lecture cautions scholars to avoid leaping to premature conclusions about literary characters, for doing so may reveal more about our own prejudices and biases than we might think. Speaking about the governess, Bruce states that “We should – shouldn’t we? – be most reluctant to make adverse findings about the autonomy, probity, and competence of a narrator – though there will be occasions of course, when we must make such adverse findings” (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–12). Certainly, as much as the governess, Mrs. Grose has often been misunderstood in the critical reception history of “The Turn of the Screw”. My aim in this chapter has thus been to advocate a reading of Mrs. Grose that foregrounds her intelligence, equanimity and perspicacity. In the same way that Bruce behoves us to “credit the teller of a tale with as much insight and truthfulness as conceivable” (Gardiner, “Henry James”, 6–15), Mrs. Grose must be praised as a remarkably sharp “reader” of the governess and the unsettling events at Bly.

Bibliography