Peter Quint

The governess’s first thoughts after seeing Peter Quint are to compare her situation to the plots of two popular gothic novels with romantic heroines, Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—the latter about a governess who marries her employer, which we know to be this governess’s fantasy. However, the effect of these references is not to make the governess’s story seem more like those novels, but just the opposite. The fact that she is inclined to see herself in terms of these gothic romances reminds us that this is not a romance; that those are fantasies rather than reality; and that even though we know that what we are reading is a work of fiction, it’s a work of realistic fiction.

The governess’s second

Grose of Peter Quint’s appearance displays a strange mixture of attraction and repulsion. Even if we feel sure that Quint is a real ghost and not a product of the governess’s mind, we may still get the sense that the governess’s perceptions about Quint are not purely insightful and that, to a certain extent, the governess projects her own desires and fears onto him. Quint is clearly a foil for the absent master—similarly attractive, and at one time the master’s proxy at Bly, but emphatically not a gentleman like the master. We know that the governess fell in love with the master during their interviews, so we can assume that the master awakened sexual desires in the governess. However, the governess has no outlet for those feelings, because the precondition for winning the master’s approval is to endure his absence and not seek to communicate with him. She describes Quint as “tall, active, erect” and “remarkably” handsome, making it clear that she finds him attractive, but she also perceives him as aggressive and terrifying. We might infer that her frustrated desire for the master is what prompts her to see Quint as a sexual substitute, as someone who is attractive but, unlike the master, available. However, Quint’s sexual availability is also terrifying, because the social consequences of sex with a man like him would be so destructive. The governess’s fear of Quint’s sexuality (or her fear of her own desire for him) seems to manifest itself as a contempt for his status as a servant, and throughout the story she dwells on the dangers and evils of his lower-class, servile, ungentlemanly