Ok, I'm half way through and really enjoying this. I do want to highlight an important sentence from chapter 1 that I think brings together several motifs that I'm seeing running through this.
Quote:
But it was a comfort that there could be no uneasiness in a connection with anything so beatific as the radiant image of my little girl, the vision of whose angelic beauty had probably more than anything else to do with the restlessness that, before morning, made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch, from my open window, the faint summer dawn, to look at such portions of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen, while, in the fading dusk, the first birds began to twitter, for the possible recurrence of a sound or two, less natural and not without, but within, that I had fancied I heard.
First that's a great sentence. I love the winding nature of it, and the modifying clauses that are tacked on, extending the experience and linking so many things together. What I'll point out I'll call motifs because without having read the entire story yet, I don't know if they're full fledged themes or how they relate to the themes, but they do see to recur. First is this notion of beauty and how that's associated with the children. That stands in contrast to the "evil" of the ghosts. There's no particular reason that I can see why the ghosts must be evil (it doesn't have to be by definition), but the Governess (we never do get a name for her, do we?) seems to jump to that conclusion. However, the anglic beauty versus evil contrast is very stark and intentionally so.
Second motif is this notion of natural and unnatural. I'm not sure this is clear to me, but certain things seem to be associated with natural, like the birds here, and unnatural such as the ghost of Peter Quint. Certainly Quint's cause of death is an unnatural act.
Third is the notion of "fancied" or what the Governess imagines and what she discerns as fact. It seems to me that there is a sort of blurring of the two going on and we aren't always sure. I do think the ghost is discerned and real.
Fourth and I think most important of all is the notion of the visual and the act of seeing. Here the Governess takes in the entire scene, a visual listing (and audio in this case as well) of the surroundings. "To watch" and "to look" seems to be a predominant, recurring action in the story. Almost every other page seems to have a reference to the visual. I keep circling them as I come across them and they are so frequent that it's beyond just a story teller describing the action. James is clearly making a point. Here let me list a few:
From chapter 2:
Quote:
She was evidently grateful for such a profession. "See him, miss, first. Then believe it!" I felt forthwith a new impatience to see him; it was the beginning of a curiosity that, for all the next hours, was to deepen almost to pain. Mrs. Grose was aware, I could judge, of what she had produced in me, and she followed it up with assurance. "You might as well believe it of the little lady. Bless her," she added the next moment--"Look at her!"
From chapter 3:
Quote:
It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I can hope to give. An unknown man in a lonely place is a permitted object of fear to a young woman privately bred; and the figure that faced me was--a few more seconds assured me--as little anyone else I knew as it was the image that had been in my mind. ...It was as if, while I took in--what I did take in--all the rest of the scene had been stricken with death. I can hear again, as I write, the intense hush in which the sounds of evening dropped. The rooks stopped cawing in the golden sky, and the friendly hour lost, for the minute, all its voice. But there was no other change in nature, unless indeed it were a change that I saw with a stranger sharpness. The gold was still in the sky, the clearness in the air, and the man who looked at me over the battlements was as definite as a picture in a frame. That's how I thought, with extraordinary quickness, of each person that he might have been and that he was not.
From chapter 4:
Quote:
He appeared thus again with I won't say greater distinctness, for that was impossible, but with a nearness that represented a forward stride in our intercourse and made me, as I met him, catch my breath and turn cold. He was the same--he was the same, and seen, this time, as he had been seen before, from the waist up, the window, though the dining room was on the ground floor, not going down to the terrace on which he stood. His face was close to the glass, yet the effect of this better view was, strangely, only to show me how intense the former had been. He remained but a few seconds--long enough to convince me he also saw and recognized; but it was as if I had been looking at him for years and had known him always. Something, however, happened this time that had not happened before; his stare into my face, through the glass and across the room, was as deep and hard as then, but it quitted me for a moment during which I could still watch it, see it fix successively several other things. 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.
And these from chapter 6:
Quote:
This chance presented itself to me in an image richly material. I was a screen--I was to stand before them. The more I saw, the less they would. I began to watch them in a stifled suspense, a disguised excitement that might well, had it continued too long, have turned to something like madness. What saved me, as I now see, was that it turned to something else altogether. It didn't last as suspense--it was superseded by horrible proofs. Proofs, I say, yes--from the moment I really took hold.
Quote:
Suddenly, in these circumstances, I became aware that, on the other side of the Sea of Azof, we had an interested spectator. The way this knowledge gathered in me was the strangest thing in the world--the strangest, that is, except the very much stranger in which it quickly merged itself. I had sat down with a piece of work--for I was something or other that could sit--on the old stone bench which overlooked the pond; and in this position I began to take in with certitude, and yet without direct vision, the presence, at a distance, of a third person. The old trees, the thick shrubbery, made a great and pleasant shade, but it was all suffused with the brightness of the hot, still hour. There was no ambiguity in anything; none whatever, at least, in the conviction I from one moment to another found myself forming as to what I should see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising my eyes.
Notice how all these paragraphs have a reference to seeing or the act of the visual. I can't say it's voyerism, but it is a passive act. I don't know what to make of it yet, but it's there in almost every chapter.
